Sometimes, war works—and sometimes it doesn't.

Here is an editorial from today's Free Press and my response. They usually call if they want to publish it, so I'm betting that they won't, since they did not call

Sometimes, war works

SOME choices are pretty simple. You can have Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity in a courtroom in Baghdad as a result of the Iraq war. Or you can have him still committing crimes against humanity against Iraqis and others as a consequence of not going to war.
You can have a democratically elected government in Afghanistan, a hope for freedom and human rights there, as a result of the Afghan war. Or you can, as a consequence of not going to war, have a brutally oppressive Taliban government that offers no hope to Afghans of a better future and serves openly as a nesting ground and safe haven for al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorist groups that promise to make the streets of Canada and other Western countries run red with blood.

You can have a free and fair democratic election in Haiti that offers the impoverished people of that wretched country at least a glimmer of hope for a better life because of an international intervention there. Or you can have the continuing corruption and the Haitian hopelessness of one dictator after another.

On Saturday, anti-war groups around the world demonstrated on the third anniversary of the war in Iraq. In Winnipeg, about 200 people rallied around an inspiring banner that declared "Winnipeg still says no to war", apparently oblivious to the fact that Winnipeg and Canada had said no to the Iraq war more than three years ago. The demonstrators did not just say "No!" to the Iraq war. They also said "No!" to the Afghan war and "No!" to the intervention in Haiti.

They did not specifically say "Yes!" to Saddam Hussein, "Yes!" to the Taliban, and "Yes!" to Haitian hopelessness, but neither did they offer a third choice to any of those three nations. That leaves the general public with pretty well only one conclusion, which can most charitably be described as that the anti-war movement, if there is in fact such a thing, is clearly against war but is not for anything useful.

Sometimes there is no alternative to war if democracies are to defend themselves and stand up for what they profess to believe. In a post-cold-war world, that has become increasingly clear to most people and it is the reason that the so-called anti-war movement is looking increasingly bedraggled these days.

Across Canada and in the United States, the anti-Iraq-war rallies fizzled because Canadians and Americans understand that intervention is not always wrong. The Iraq war has been difficult, but it is working and has been worthwhile. The alternative is Saddam Hussein in jackboots instead of handcuffs. The Afghan war has gone well but remains messy. The alternative, however, is the international nightmare of the Taliban. Haiti is perhaps in its essence the messiest of them all, but Haiti now has at least a hint of hope. Canada did not participate in the Iraq war, but it has been an important player in Afghanistan and Haiti. Canadians should be proud of that -- and grateful that, thanks to their soldiers, they can still walk the streets and object to it.

...and sometimes, it doesn't.

Though the hawkish editors of the Free Press like our chances for war these days, they aught to be careful when gleefully celebrating different conflicts under the same banner. Equating Afghanistan to Haiti to Iraq is disingenuous and endangers the moral justification for these separate engagements.

Case in point: the contention that the war in Iraq "has been difficult but worthwhile" is completely counter to almost everything else I've read, lest it be a White House press release. The war is mired in deceit; it is costing the U.S. billions, has deteriorated its international credibility, and has led Iraq to the brink of civil war. Going well you say?

The editorial points to the fact that it was important to rid Iraq of Saddam, but there are dozens of other tyrants who are as ripe for replacement as he was; when will the editors demand we go to war in Central Africa?

Easy as it is to poke fun at a poorly attended peace protest the Free Press does its readership a disservice by using it as a tactic to glorify unjustifiable Imperialistic wars.