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The Administration says these military risks must be taken because Saddam has chemical and biological weapons and is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons—and will use them on the U.S. or its allies unless we strike first. When the U.S. faced a mortal threat not 6,000 but ninety miles away during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a threat for which the evidence was incontrovertible as it is not with Iraq, President Kennedy rejected a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet missiles. Striking first, his brother Robert said, was un-American—it would be "a Pearl Harbor in reverse." If the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes had been in place, the Soviet commanders on the scene, faced as Saddam will be with a "use it or lose it" situation, would likely have launched their missiles. We now know they were nuclear-armed. The Bush Doctrine would almost certainly have led to nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR. It stands condemned by the sternest test in our history. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the presidential historian and former adviser to President Kennedy, wrote recently, basing a declaration of war on fear instead of on overt acts of belligerency is not only illegal under international law but also immoral. It cannot be right to kill a country's civilians because you are afraid of what their ruler might do to you. Pearl Harbor lives in infamy.

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Stalin scourged the Russian people, yet he successfully appealed to their nationalism to defeat the Nazis. Pol Pot, after killing more than a million of his fellow Cambodians, was able to mobilize support against the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. Saddam's strategy will be to draw us into the cities. In the open we can target his artillery, neutralizing his capacity to deliver chemical weapons. That will be difficult to do in the streets of Baghdad. Saddam will want to make us kill civilians to get at him, knowing that the bomb blasts, the collapsing houses, the bloody faces and torn bodies will be shown throughout the Arab world by al Jazeera, exacting a potentially catastrophic political price. Beyond the battlefield, if Saddam strikes Israel with weapons of mass destruction Israel could well respond with nuclear weapons—so Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, testified before a Senate hearing in August. According to a former CIA agent who spoke recently with Iraqi government officials, Saddam plans to "take the Middle East down with him"—to strike Israel, to use a fifth column within Saudi Arabia to sabotage oil production, to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S. forces. Street fighting, chemical weapons, a possible nuclear strike—"a cakewalk?"

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Testify, brother!

Clock, that is one barn-burning bit of prose indeed. Why have I never heard of this writer before?