Posted 1:15 PM by Floyd

The anti-war movement is intellectually bereft. Its leaders lie continuously, and furthermore they apply the same discredited lies to each new situations. Its followers are out of touch with reality, so the question of truth becomes moot. Witness these letters in today's Mercury News:

THE drums of war are beating louder and louder every day. Why are we going to attack a country that hasn't attacked us? We do not have incontrovertible evidence that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and even if we did, wouldn't an attack on him make him more likely to use them? The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace feels that the U.S. goal of preventing an attack by Iraq has already been achieved. Saddam is being watched so closely by the inspectors and by the world in general that any aggression would result in immediate devastation.

Let the inspections work. Let's not send our young men and women to kill and be killed.

Lynda Sayre
Big Sur

First off, I get a point for finding a "drums of war" reference.

I note that Sayre is presented with two choices: Invade, cause a few causalties, and rescue Iraq from Saddam and America from fear of an Iraqi-sponsored terrorist attack. Choice two is to sit on our asses and if attacked by Saddam, retaliate with hydrogen bombs.

Does the Carnegie Endowment approve of Sayre's choice? Maybe they should send her a leaflet.

GEORGE Bush's State of the Union claim that ``we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations'' is surely a leading contender for whopper of the millennium, but Colin Powell's statement Wednesday that ``no country has had more battlefield experience with chemical weapons since World War I than Saddam Hussein's Iraq'' is certainly in contention.

Has Powell forgotten about the massive American use of Agent Orange and napalm in Vietnam? Or the thousands of tons of depleted uranium weapons dropped on Iraq and Yugoslavia? If you're looking for the leading users of chemical weapons in the world today you need look no farther than Washington.

Steven Patt
Cupertino

Napalm is jelled gasoline; it is used to burn things. Agent Orange is a chemical weapon -- against plants. Depleted uranium is used for its physical properties and is not very radioactive (the non-plants amongst you would have guessed that from the "depleted" part).

I guess you could call all of these chemical weapons, as they involve chemistry. Of course so do gunpowder or cordite. In fact, this blog is a chemical weapon!