Interesting column by Amos Oz (a wonderful Israeli author whose name is pronounced like Ohs, not like the Wizard of) in The New York Times today:

The protesters have it wrong: this war campaign does not emanate from oil lust or from colonialist appetite. It emanates primarily from a simplistic rectitude that aspires to uproot evil by force.

I recently saw a breakdown of just where the US gets its foreign oil, and was surprised. I can't locate the numbers right now, but Canada was our leading importer, then a collection of Middle Eastern countries (including Iraq and Saudi Arabia), then a few loose odds and ends in South America. I still think oil is a huge issue in this soon-to-be war -- and that "no blood for oil" has some serious resonance -- but I think Amos Oz does have a point about the philosophical underpinnings of the administration. All the religious rhetoric, all the casting about for metaphor, certainly points in that direction.

And I'm not so dovish that I believe evil never has to be uprooted by force (thinking Nazis here), but I don't know that it's the answer to enemy that we're supposed think is a lone dictator rather than entrenched country-wide infrastructure. I also don't think it's an answer to a whole culture of people who are angry enough with this country to try to kill its citizens. If elusiveness is the order of the day, even if you're sure what the evil is, it seems to me that uprooting it becomes a little tricky. But what do I know.