By the time these words are published, the United States will, by most estimates, have gone to war with the vile Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. God willing, the war will be over. Although I was never quite persuaded that anyone outside of Iraq itself had as much to fear from those fabled “weapons of mass destruction,” which the administration went to so much trouble to adduce as its casus belli, as from the effort to eliminate them, I didn’t see how it was possible for any ordinarily decent person not to regard at least with sympathy and admiration any effort of diplomacy or military intervention which promised to end the dictatorial reign of a man who deserves, if anyone alive in the world today deserves it, the adjective “evil.” Saddam Hussein’s long career of murder and torture and attempted genocide against the Kurds is well-documented and hardly in dispute even among opponents of the war. Yet those opponents don’t seem to care very much about this.

On the contrary, many of them, to judge from the demonstrators who came to Washington in January, are much more exercised about the evil of what the spy-novelist John le Carré, in an astonishingly intemperate and ill-written piece in The Timesof London, called “the Bush junta.” Where do such ideas come from? “Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld: The Real Axis of Evil,” read one of the signs brandished by the demonstrators. Oh really? Do they suppose that fair-minded observers will simply