Anti-War Protestors Are Warmongers for Our Enemies

CNSNews.com ^ | February 11, 2003 | Alex Epstein

[Stand Watch Listen]

President's Day weekend is a time when Americans should celebrate the heroism of Washington and Lincoln, the men who led our country through its two most important wars.

But hundreds of thousands of Americans will instead devote February 15 and 16 to spitting on the accomplishments of these great men -- by rallying for policies that would enable our enemies to obliterate the freedom that Washington and Lincoln fought to secure. They are the members of the self-proclaimed "anti-war" movement.

Of course, the throngs who will participate in the upcoming "anti-war" protests in New York, San Francisco, and many other cities to voice their opposition to an invasion of Iraq -- and to any other U.S. military action in the War on Terrorism -- claim a benevolent purpose. "You can bomb the world to pieces," they chant, "but you can't bomb it into
peace."

But if dropping bombs won't work, what should the United States do to obtain a peaceful relationship with the numerous hostile regimes, including Iraq, that seek to harm us with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction? The "peace advocates" offer no answer. The most one can coax out of them are vague platitudes (we should "make common cause with the people of the world," says the prominent "anti-war" group Not In Our Name) and agonized soul-searching ("Why do they hate us?").

The absence of a peacenik peace plan is no accident. Pacifism is inherently a negative doctrine--it merely says that military action is always bad. As one San Francisco protestor put the point: "I don't think it's right for our government to kill people." In practice, this leaves the government only two means of dealing with our enemies: to ignore their acts of aggression, or to appease them by capitulating to the aggressors' demands.

We do not need to predict or deduce the consequences of pacifism with regard to terrorism and the nations that sponsor it, because we experienced those consequences on September 11. Pacifism practically dictated the American response to terrorism for more than 23 years, from our government's response to the first major act of Islamic terrorism
against this country: when Iranian mobs held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days at the American embassy in Tehran.

In response to that and later terrorist atrocities, American Presidents sought to avoid military action at all costs--by treating terrorists as isolated criminals and thereby ignoring the role of the governments that support them, or by offering diplomatic handouts to terrorist states in hopes that they would want to be our friends. With each pacifist response it became clearer that the most powerful nation on Earth was a paper tiger -- and our enemies made the most of it.

After years of American politicians acting like peaceniks, Islamic terrorism had proliferated from a few gangs of thugs to a worldwide scourge -- making possible the attacks of September 11.

It is an obvious evasion of history and logic for the advocates of pacifism to label themselves "anti-war," since the policies they advocate necessarily invite escalating acts of war against anyone who practices them. Military inaction sends the message to an aggressor--and to other, potential aggressors -- that it will benefit by attacking the United States.

To whatever extent "anti-war" protesters influence policy, they are not helping to prevent war; they are acting to make war more frequent and deadly, by making our enemies more aggressive, more plentiful, and more powerful.

The only way to deal with militant enemies is to show them unequivocally that aggression against the United States will lead to their destruction. The only means of imparting this lesson is overwhelming military force -- enough to defeat and incapacitate the enemy. Had we annihilated the Iranian regime 23 years ago, we could have thwarted Islamic terrorism at the beginning, with far less cost than will be required to defeat terrorism today.

And if we fail to use our military against state sponsors of terrorism today, imagine the challenge we will face five years from now when Iraq and Iran possess nuclear weapons and are ready to disseminate them to their terrorist minions. Yet such a world is the goal of the "anti-war" movement.

The suicidal stance of peaceniks is no innocent error or mere overflow of youthful idealism. It is the product of a fundamentally immoral commitment: the commitment to ignore reality -- from the historical evidence of the consequences of pacifism to the very existence of the violent threats that confront us today -- in favor of the wish that laying
down our arms will achieve peace somehow.

Those of us who are committed to facing the facts should condemn these peaceniks for what they really are: warmongers for our enemies.

( Alex Epstein is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institue in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.)

Ayn Rand Institute

[areafiftyone]

THEY ARE NOT AMERICANS - they are ANTI-AMERICANS connected to communist groups who are doing this to support terrorist regimes. They cry when we call them anti-Americans. Well, peaceniks - look at the facts for once. Check out who you are supporting in your protests and who organizes these events for you. Its written there in black and white and you still don't get it. Well stupid is as stupid does!

[x-navy seal]

Piss a liberal off. Put this sign in your yard. Take it to the rally and show your support.

I want to thank registered for the creation of the immage. I only added the text.

[joesnuffy]

I like this...

[RummyChick]

Is this sign done anywhere with or without the extra letters anywhere in a format that can be downloaded and taken to a printing store