I accept Rylander's challenge to respond to James Carroll's Boston Globe column raising questions about the impending war in Iraq.

Having lived with Hussein as a mortal enemy for more than a decade, is the urgency of replacing him now a result less of real evidence of increased threat than of the ''us versus them'' mind-set that drives the war on terrorism? Is the cause of war something Hussein is doing, or is it something we are imagining?

Carroll is using specious, child-like reasoning in his framing this question. Imagine a child saying "My room has been messy and I've been smoking pot for the past month and you haven't done anything about it yet except keep warning me. How come you're grounding me now?" Just because we've been putting up with a lot from Saddam Hussein does not make his actions any more acceptable. People are getting the strange idea that we just woke up after September 11th and said, "You know, we've never liked that Saddam, we ought to just commit troops and money to oust him." There is a reason we don't like him. We've been threatening military action on the matter for as long as I can remember. Maybe it isn't Carroll's fault. There has been so much talk about if and how we will do it that we haven't really discussed "why" in a while. Let me say it slowly. Well, I'm typing it fast, but read it slowly or repititiously so that we don't have to start from square one every reason you conveniently forget what our problem with Hussein is:

Hussein is trying to develop weapons of mass production, presumably to use against us, and refuses to submit to weapons inspection so that we can assure that he is not presently doing so.

No, this isn't a new phenomenon. Yes, we put up with it throughout Clinton's administration. Carroll is right and there is a new imperitive to knock him out of power. It's not unilateralism for its own sake as he suggests, but rather the realization after September 11th that we are not inpenetrable and threats against our nation ought to be taken seriously. We did not take bin Laden seriously until it was too late. We do not intend to make that mistake again. Perhaps Scott Ritter is right and Hussein does not pose a threat. Perhaps he is wrong and Hussein does. The point is we don't know and Hussein isn't saying and we can't just assume that he doesn't have them until he does. Weapons inspections are the only way we can do that. In case Carroll and Rylander have forgotten, Hussein isn't letting them in.

Does the bellicosity of the Bush administration eliminate the alternatives to war? For example, ''containment and deterrence,'' which worked against the Soviet Union and have so far worked against Hussein, depend on the cooperation of other nations. Is Bush's chest-thumping war talk, even short of actual invasion, destroying that cooperation?

How do you define "working"? Yes, they are working insofar as Hussein has not lead an attack on our nation yet. Do we want to wait until he does before we can officially say that it isn't working? Arguably, our sanctions on Iraq has been a part of the "containment and deterrence" strategy that Carroll has proclaimed working. Am I then to assume that Carroll is in favor of the sanctions? I honestly don't know if he is or not, but I do know that support for it has been waning for some time. Why? Because the same people that oppose invading Iraq are arguing that the current sanctions are hurting the people of Iraq and are not working. Opponents of the war can't have it both ways. Maybe now that we're talking war they'll say that the embargo isn't so bad, but they didn't like them a year ago and if we don't invade Iraq (and it doesn't look like we're going to) they won't like them a year from now.

When the US goal shifts from one of moderating Hussein's behavior to the openly expressed purpose of ''regime change,'' what does Hussein have to lose? And when Hussein knows an invading US force is surely coming, does he not have to ''use or lose'' whatever weapons he has? Isn't Washington forcing him to respond with his worst?

The goal did not magically move. We're talking about a regime change because Hussein hasn't changed his behavior. It's become apparent that he's not going to. If he doesn't have weapons of mass destruction right now, then his worst isn't all that bad. Two questions ago he was saying that Hussein isn't a threat to us and now he's saying that we should fear his reprisal. Again, you can't have it both ways. Maybe Carroll believes that Hussein can hurt us but isn't, but that contradicts Scott Ritter whom he approvingly cites as an expert who says that Hussein isn't a capable threat.

What effect would a major American war against Iraq have on the broader conflict between Islam and the West? If Al Qaeda grew out of the humiliations attached to the Gulf War, what would grow out of the new humiliation of a massive US imposition on Iraq, including the necessity of a long-term occupation by the United States?

A religious crusader Hussein is not. A friend of Saudi Arabia and other regional nations he is not. They may dislike Iraq less than they don't want us to interfere, but there is no chance that they would go do the mat with us over a dictator they brought us over a decade earlier to push back. In any case, the effect that it has might even be positive. We're passed the point of getting them to like us. If we make them fear us, that should be sufficient. With the help of the Northern Alliance, we toppled the Taliban in the matter of a couple months. If we topple Hussein because he wouldn't comply with our requests, it will make the governments think twice before screwing with us. Will it make them hate us? They already do. Will they openly declare war on us? That's not likely. They need us every bit as much as we need them.

Many of these questions were asked in one form or another before we invaded Afghanistan. Robert Wright wrote passionately about how the Arab Street will rise against us, there will be a coup in Pakistan, and so on. It didn't happen. While we obviously shouldn't go out of our way to make them angry, it is simply bad policy to avoid taking measures for national security (even if they aren't of immediate importance) to make sure that we don't anger them. We're too big to walk on eggshells.

What does it say about the United States that we are about to become a ''first-strike'' nation? Abandoning multilateralism, have we abandoned diplomacy as well? Is war no longer a last resort, taken in self-defense, but a routine method of getting our way, since no one can stop us? Has the time come for us to reverse the National Security Act of 1947 and go back to calling the ''Defense Department'' the ''War Department?''

He talks about us getting "our way" as if we are a kid who doesn't want to drink Diet Coke and will whine about it until he gets the real thing. "Our way" is the security of our nation. "Our way" is the assurance that Saddam won't use us to make himself a hero in our region and ensure his immortality the way that bin Laden has. Multilateralism doesn't work when no one agrees with what you want to do. Europe doesn't want us to invade Iraq, but they also don't want us to sanction Iraq. Saddam isn't going to attack Europe, but he may attack us. George H. Bush's coalition is dead. We don't need Europe anymore so we don't have to listen to them anymore. However, the truth of the matter is that we are listening to them. We disagree. They are not in a position to tell us what to do. It is not a sign of a moral difficiency not to do what they tell us because their stake in this is not nearly as big ours.

Would a war against Iraq, with its risk of inflaming the ''clash of civilizations'' and its likely weakening of ties between the United States and our allies, make our nation more vulnerable to terrorist attacks? If the only real way to track down Al Qaeda and prevent future attacks is through the very multilateralism that the Bush war would weaken, isn't Bush still enacting the script written by Osama bin Laden?

War opponents said the same thing with Afghanistan. The answer was no. It still is.

UPDATE: Rylander responds

For now, I will just say this -- the comparison he draws at the end of the piece to the war in Afghanistan is specious. A lot of people who supported attacks against Al Qaeda and removal of the Taliban--myself included--nonetheless have questions about widening the war effort to Iraq at this time. It's not a reflexive liberal anti-war argument. Mine is a how far can we stretch the military, can we achieve a regime change, and what will it mean for the Arab-Israeli conflict for the United States to attempt to remove Saddam at this time argument. Sorry, Alex. I'm just not convinced yet.

Those are better arguments than the article that he sites, in my opinion. My question to him is if "at this time" then when? Do we issue more threats to be ignored? Do we wait for Hussein to have the capability of hurting us? The Israel-Palestine conflict can be assumed to be indefinite. I'm not sure how far we can stretch the military, but I suspect that the reason we haven't been doing much militarily lately (to Bush's political disadvantage, I might add) is to rebuild our capabilities.

As for the Comparison with Iraq, the comparison I was making wasin response to that *specific* argument. Carroll (in the form of inquiry) suggests that we shouldn't attack Iraq because it is exactly what bin Laden wants us to do and our mere interference may make them rise against us. That particular question was a form of the "Arab Street" argument made about Afghanistan. To be sure, what we did in Afghanistan and what we plan to do in Iraq are different in nature and I don't believe it intellectually inconsistent to support the former and oppose the latter. However, with respect to the argument that we shouldn't do it because it will enrage the Arabs, Afghanistan demonstrates a solid counterargument. We did what we did there over there strong objections and even they now admit it was effective and the Afghans are better off for it. They felt no kinship with the Taliban and they don't feel any kinship with Saddam.*