Ms. Ryan – In response to your distinctly disingenuous plea (editorial page, Sept. 29th) for straight answers to the questions posed by President Bush’s embrace of preemption, unilateralism, and reckless militarism (for brevity –PURM), let me try to oblige by asking you to consider the following scenario. Imagine the Bush White House takes your counsel and rejects PURM as too cowboy-like. But then, for example, suppose in the not so distant future, we learn through definitive intelligence that Iraq, together with shadowy stateless terrorist proxies, have acquired suitcase nukes, lots of them, and as many reasonable observers have feared, delivered them in containers, complete with remote detonation devices, to various U.S. port cities. And like sleeper cells, the devices are already here. Would you then have any recriminations about your previous pacifism and still confess to “feeling a bit dense” about all this? Or would your mind be a bit more focused? In short, Joan, what if your assumptions are very wrong?

Okay, that wasn’t a straight answer. What follows here is my attempt at a few straight ones. More »