[...] Much of the anti-war movement has shown the left at its worst—that is, when it behaves as though naïveté is a virtue in policy debates. Last weekend, I received an e-mail from an anti-war friend. It was a jpeg of a spare line drawing: a dove holding an olive branch in its beak, captioned simply with the word "Imagine." While I admit that countering force with John Lennon songs hasn't yet been tried, I think, in Saddam's case, that force may still be the best way to counter force. If I had any artistic skills, I could have responded to the dove/olive branch message with a re-creation of that famous Vietnam-era poster with the childlike flower illustration, but with an updated caption: Naïveté Is Helpful To Dictators And Other Killing Things.

As has been asked by others before, could today's left ever get it together to assemble an Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as it did in the '30s? What would the response be today to such a call to arms? Maybe it would go like this: "Well, yes, we all agree that Senor Franco is a bad man, and that we certainly would like to see him step down, but he is a Latino -- and as a Latino, is thus a Person of Color. And for us to attack a Person of Color, well, that would leave us wide open to charges of insensitivity, wouldn't it?" [...]