GROUND ZERO, New York City, Mar. 21-- Splitting hairs over war is a delicate task, one that can end up with the loss of a finger or two if the razor slips.

      As America launched its first attacks against Iraqi leadership in an attempt to "decapitate" Saddam Hussein's power and force the surrender of Iraqi troops, thousands of protestors throughout the United States and the world rallied against war.
        In Chicago they stopped traffic.  In New York's Times Square they laid down on Broadway.  In San Francisco more than 1,000 were arrested as the city erupted in anarchy, including pelting police cars with rocks and looting businesses.
        But it was all hair splitting.

        Out of one corner of the protestors' mouths they condemn war.  Out of the other, they say they support the men and women who are fighting it--all volunteers, comprising a quarter million Americans and some 50,000 British and Australian warriors.
        I am perplexed, as always, at the hair splitting difference between supporting a warrior in war and raillery against it.
        It is a chicken and egg dilemma to me.  
        If one cavils against war, yet utters their support for the men and women fighting it, what does that mean?   Is the warrior exempt from the war?   Or, are the protestors trying to split the hairs of war and perform calumny against the leaders of war while providing sanctuary for those who carry it out?

        I looked up the elusive history of the phrase, "hair splitting" to try and understand how one can carve the "hair of war" into two precision parts, one half isolating the leaders who wage it, the other from those who enforce the order.
         Even the Oxford English Dictionary was confusing over its meaning.  It attributes hair splitting to origins in 1652, to wit:  "Machiavelli cut the hair when he advised, not absolutely to disavow conscience, to manage it with such a prudent neglect, as is scarce discernible from a tenderness."
         I think he was talking about the finite difference between good or bad, right and wrong, just and unjust.
         In 1948 Charles Earl Funk wrote that "splitting hairs" originally meant "to divide into exactly even amounts, so as to afford no slightest advantage."
         James Rogers, in the 1985 volume The Dictionary Of Clichés, says the literal splitting of hair was so difficult as to be a waste of time.
         Protestors, however, seem to have carved the hair of war exactly in half--dividing those who wage it from those who fight it.  One is puppet, the other the puppeteer.   One the master, the other the slave.

         It rubs salt into my old wounds, this hair splitting of war.
         It makes me want to scream, "Where were the protestors when the tyranny was underway?  Where were the protestors when Iraqi prisons choked with victims sent to dungeons to be beaten, starved, executed, raped because they protested the leadership of Saddam Hussein?   Where were the protestors when Saddam gassed thousands of Kurds, including women and children?   Why didn't they lay down in Times Square then, or overturn police cars in San Francisco, or clog the highways of Chicago?  
         Where were the protestors when Saddam killed his two sons-in-law and dragged their bodies through Baghdad?   Or when he defied the U.N. for a dozen years and continued to produce weapons of mass destruction that led to his sons-in-laws defecting to Jordan with their wives and children and delivering to the U.N. proof of Saddam's weapons manufacturing?
        Why didn't the protestors who find it so easy to rail against the U.S. leadership today, find it worthy to besmirch the reputation of Saddam then?
         Why focus all protest energy against America's moral right and its legal authority to unilaterally act against Terrorism and Tyranny?
         This is the hair that should be split, if any at all.
         It is a simple splitting to me.   On one side is Vigilance, on the other, Terrorism.
         But protestors don't see that when they carve the "hair of war."   Their two halves are "wrong" and "wrong."    They are equal halves with no opposites, no black versus white, no left versus right, no just versus unjust nature.

         They have plucked the "hair of war" not split it.
          As I look at the protestors screaming and jeering-- hurling invectives at American leadership as being criminal and unjust, in violation of any moral authority--I cringe.  My skin crawls as though I were staked naked in a fermenting swamp and my tormenters set upon my body an army of starving blood sucking leeches.
         Inside, the lion of my soul roars.  I hear the screams of the Sentinels of Vigilance, those thousands who died on Nine Eleven, sobbing in great pain as they see the children of America falling victim not to the Right to Protest, but to the whim and will of the Beast of Terror who feeds them Fear of their nation, Intimidation of its leadership, and Complacency of actions that are not only just, but justly overdo.
          I have seen the leaders of protest marches twist their mouths into masks of hatred, turning their rhetoric not against the Beasts of Horror who smash the rights of others, or torture them into oblivion, or plot and plan to issue weapons of mass destruction to any and all who hate the "infidels," but upon the elders of the nation, the leaders, in an attempt to amoralize their actions, to criminalize their Vigilance against tyranny. 

         These leaders of protest have but one agenda.  It is to destroy the moral foundations of America, to gnaw as termites do at any faith or belief the young have in their country, and to blacken its conduct so that the true Beast of Terror--Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Osama bin Laden and the other Hitlers before and who will follow--appear saintly in juxtaposition to their leadership, their Fathers and Mothers of Vigilance.
          Terrorism is the injection of Fear, Intimidation and Complacency into the minds and hearts of a society.  It specifically targets the weak, the vulnerable, the innocent incapable of defending themselves.
          Protestors are fed such Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.  They are fired by the leaders of protest to Fear their leadership on the grounds such leadership is immoral, seeking to fight a war in Iraq for the sole purpose of winning the oil fields.    They are given signs that read, "No War For Oil."  The protest leaders split the hair so only the oily side can be seen.   They deny the other side of the hair--Freedom, Liberty, the fundamental right of self-rule, the right to protest, democracy in opposition to tyranny.

         They Intimidate the youth who follow them by citing "crimes against humanity."   They call their leaders the "evil ones," and parade false evidence that troops are being enslaved into fighting the enemy, composed of minorities who blindly follow orders because they couldn't get a job. 

 The protest leaders do not remind their progeny that the Secretary of State is African American, or the President's closest advisor, Ms. Condoleeza Rice, is African American.   They split those hairs nefariously, excluding them from the attacks on a "white supremist leadership module" seeking to puppet  the 250,000 American troops.
         And there is the Complacency, the sad, soul-sucking Complacency that falls like a shroud of dismay upon the protest body.    There is no talk among them of their silence when the pain of Iraq screamed for world attention.    There is no reminder that the war being fought today is the culmination of a world that refused to stand up to Terrorism in the past, but instead acceded to its power to grow and prosper without penalty.    There is no indictment of the protestor's utter disregard for the plight of the people of Iraq when Saddam gassed them, or imprisoned them, or sent his rape and execution squads to punish any and all who opposed his points of view.
       To split that hair would be to reveal the true scourge of the protest itself, for it would remind all who scream and shout that it was they, the body politic, who did nothing until it was too late.  It was they, the Citizens of Complacency, who turned their heads against the weak and suffering of Iraq over the past 23 years Saddam Hussein has ruled his land.
        The protestors don't want to look at the fact they are being led by the nose by Terrorism itself.    The Beast of Protest Terror wants them to shout down America, to destroy its right to defend the people of Iraq and the right to protect the security not only of America and the world by removing Saddam Hussein.

          Every sane nation knows Saddam is a rogue leader.  They know left to his own devices he will build and sell weapons of mass destruction.  They know he has a long history to horrible acts and crimes against humanity.   They all voted to remove those weapons in Resolution 1441.
        But instead of lauding American resolve to act while others stand and watch, the Beasts of Protest Terror eviscerate America's moral entrails.   They gut America's authority to preemptively act against a known Terrorist who pays suicide bombers $25,000 every time one blows up innocent men, women and children.
       There are no signs to protest his support of Terrorism.   There are no pictures of his grandchildren's fathers being dragged through Baghdad, their dead bodies kicking up dust as a reminder to any that may think of opposing him that they will suffer the same fate.
        There are no pictures of thousands of Kurdish children and women lying rotting in the sun after Saddam gassed them.   There are no pictures of rape rooms where Saddam's men bring  prisoners wives and children and ravage them before the prisoner's eyes.   There are no signs protesting Saddam's son whipping and beating his Olympic team, torturing them because they did not win.
        The Beast of Protest Terror split those hairs decisively, insuring no one could see the other half.
        I am befuddled by protestors.   They turn their hatred not against the Beast of Terror, but against the Sentinels of Vigilance.   They attack their mothers and fathers, their grandparents, their brothers and sisters, cousins and nephews.   They dance on the graves of all Americans who have ever fought and died in foreign lands and left those lands without capturing those land's resources, or enslaved their people.

        But to look at the signs--No War For Oil--one would think America is going to build a pipeline from Iraq to New York and steal the resources of the country, enslave the people to serve as puppets of American whims.
        They do not hold up posters of France and Germany, both nations America helped liberate.  They don't cite the millions of people who live in free lands, once ruled by despots like Saddam, that America went to war to liberate.
        No.  That would be splitting the hair too closely.
        I am  sad the Beast of Protest Terror rules the minds of so many.   
        I hear the tears of the Sentinels of Vigilance falling from Ground Zero as the invectives are shouted by the children, led by the horned devils of Terrorism to believe America is corrupt, immoral, imperialistic in its attack on Terrorism in Iraq.
        I was spat upon by the same children when I returned from Vietnam.  That spittle hasn't dried.
        As an American, I have learned to accept the fact we have the right to be wrong.  Few citizens in few nations have that right.
       In Iraq, if the protestors of America and the world were to take to the streets with signs and shouts in opposition to Saddam Hussein, they would be shot, tortured, raped.  Their families would be murdered.   Their bodies dragged through the streets.
       There is none of that happening here in America.

        But the Beasts of Protest Terror do not speak of that when they call upon the children to lay down in the streets, to scream their hatred of the President and the nation as being war criminals, unjust moral reprobates.
        No.   The children of the Beast of Protest Terror march blindly into the Jaws of the Beast of Terror, a lemmings off the edge of the earth, as mice following a Pied Piper.
        I cry.
        I cry for Vigilance on their part.
        I cry they might split the hair fairly, look at both sides, not just one.
        I cry they lead rather than follow.
        I cry they listen to the tears of the Sentinels of Vigilance--those countless thousands of Saddam's victims upon whose tortured body he has built his regime.
        I cry the children misunderstand that the war being fought is the result of their lack of protest back when Saddam first raped his first prisoner's family, or butchered the first batch of innocent, or dragged his first body through Baghdad.

        I cry that our children follow the Beast of Terror down the highways of America, and cannot see the Sentinels of Vigilance fluttering above them, shouting warnings that if they forget to fight Terrorism, their children may be its next victims.

Mar. 20--The Anti-War Battle For Times Square