Liberals choose the wrong battles

I am trying to understand - just what do liberals call a country that has a supreme dictator with an SS-like force called the Mukhabarat that oppresses and murders his people and simultaneously exports terrorism and hostile acts against both neighboring and distant states while developing weapons of mass destruction?

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The liberals were wrong on Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Cambodia, Russia, Bosnia, Serbia, Cuba and Angola - why should they change their anti-American opinions now (i.e., that everyone but America is right)?

Which human rights and environmental violations does the left consider worth its protestations: the videotaped raping of women and young girls to obtain information from their families? The torture of children and adults? The genocidal poisoning of water supplies and the gassing of 200,000 Kurds? The diversion of marshland water with dikes to turn the homelands of Shiites in the south into desert, filling mass graves with 100,000 Shiites? The public executions of anyone criticizing the regime of Iraq? Or the fact that women can't join men's clubs in the United States?

Maybe the pollution of the atmosphere with 2 million tons of carbon dioxide-filled smoke, and the destruction of wildlife by dumping 8 million barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf, can't be compared with the atrociousness of hostile Americans who drive SUVs, but there comes a time when men must take a stand and do what is right.

What sort of moral outrage can organize itself against the Augusta National Golf Club, but give Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a free walk to negotiate oil deals with France, Russia and China - and chemical and technology deals with Germany?

President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, said in the 1950s that the United States had become one the most powerful forces for good on Earth. President John Kennedy said in the 1960s that the United States would pay any price, bear any burden and oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty. Why don't we act like that now?

William J. Welsh, M.D., Augusta