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I've heard a lot of people say in recent weeks things like "Well, I know that Hussein does have the WMDs, even though I haven't seen any evidence of it, so if the inspectors can't find 'em, that's enough cause for the US to attack."

I take a lot of things on faith, so I can't really fault people for believing things without evidence. But I did want to note that the guy in charge of the International Atomic Energy Agency told the UN Security Council a couple weeks ago that "fake documents backed [the] U.S. claims [that] Baghdad had tried to buy uranium to make bombs. " Also: "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."

But, okay, say the WMDs are there even though there's no evidence of that. Also, we know that Hussein has done some really nasty stuff; I definitely don't dispute that. So the next question is: Is going to war the best solution?

And this is where we pacifists have been falling down on the job. As Vardibidian noted recently, the US has been engaging in warlike activities against Iraq for the past decade. In some sense, it was never a question of whether we would go to war, but rather of what sort of war we would (continue to) engage them in. And if the goal is to remove Hussein, what options do we have?

An article entitled "With Weapons of the Will," from the September/October 2002 issue of Sojourners, includes some fascinating suggestions on that topic. A few excerpts:

[H]ard-nosed policymakers and most commentators dismiss the idea out of hand, saying that nonviolence won't work against a tyrant as pathological as Saddam. That is because they don't know how to distinguish between what has popularly been regarded as "nonviolence" and the strategic nonviolent action that has hammered authoritarian regimes to the point of defenestrating dictators....

...[H]istory-making nonviolent resistance ... involves the use of a panoply of forceful sanctions—strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, disrupting the functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage—in accordance with a strategy for undermining an oppressor's pillars of support. It is not about making a point, it's about taking power.

...[O]ppressive rulers who have been brought down by nonviolent movements ... did not tolerate a degree of dissent or refrain from murdering all opponents because they were [soft].... These were all dictatorial regimes, meaning that openness was tolerated only as necessary to maintain the facade of internal or external legitimacy.... And the Raj in India was not [an] exception..., unless you think that the massacre at Amritsar or the killings at Dharasana were merely unfortunate lapses in English manners.

...Strategic nonviolent action is not about being nice to your oppressor, much less having to rely on his niceness. It's about dissolving the foundations of his power and forcing him out.

I think it's a pretty remarkable piece. Well worth reading the whole thing.