Peacemongers Should Be Apologizing Not Marching

Visitors to the website of International ANSWER, the front organization for the pro-communist Workers World Party, are exhorted to "Stop the War on Iraq" at marches in Washington and San Francisco on April 12. That's this Saturday.

Actually, the military might and presidential resolve of the United States are already stopping the war in Iraq. Stopping it by destroying its regime. This is not what Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Howard Dean, Jacques Chirac, Jude Wanniski, Pat Buchanan, Wallace Shawn, Robert Novak and their pals had in mind, but it is the best way to end a war - by defeating an enemy that threatened the peace of the world, a regime that oppressed, tortured and killed its own people.

As the Washington Post reported Tuesday afternoon, "After three weeks of war, Saddam Hussein no longer rules Baghdad. U.S. tanks rolled unmolested into the center of Iraq's capital city today to a tumultuous welcome from jubilant residents."

But, like Iraq's Information Minister, who said Tuesday that Americans " are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks," the anti-war protesters remain clueless. They're still planning their marches.

Instead, they should be apologizing.

Before the war, they told us that 500,000 Iraqis would be killed in Dresden-like bombing, that we would precipitate an eco-catastrophe by pushing Saddam to set fire to his oil wells, that millions of people would flee the country, that thousands of our own troops would be killed, that the Arab "street" would rise up, that terrorist attacks would resume ferociously on our homeland, that Iraqis would tenaciously resist our colonization of their land, that we would become bogged down in urban warfare, and on and on.

In fact, none of that has happened. It has been a war unmatched in history, with relatively few civilian and allied casualties and the prime objectives - control of the capital and the destruction of Saddam's regime - achieved in only a few weeks.

Conscientious opponents of the war should say they were wrong, wrong, wrong - on all counts. Certainly, if there had been failures, they would have condemned Bush administration officials and supporters of the war.

And, as for supporters: no, it is not over yet, but a little celebration, even gloating, is in order.

It took political courage to tell the Security Council, the French, the Germans, the Russians, that inspections were a dead end. And it took personal courage for our troops to carry the battle 500 miles to the heart of the capital of fear and mass destruction.

Maybe it's time for a different kind of Stop the War parade in Washington - a victory march.

James K. Glassman is the host of TechCentralStation.com.