Drum beats in Congress, debate in the hinterlands
By Mindy Cameron
Guest columnist
The Seattle Times
Wednesday, October 23, 2002 - 12:00 a.m. Pacific
SANDPOINT, Idaho — It's happened in Paris and London, in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. It has even happened here in Sandpoint.
In recent weeks, people have gathered in predictable — and unpredictable — places to voice their opposition to the Bush administration plan for a preemptive war against Saddam Hussein.
A genuine debate about the wisdom of war in Iraq is under way across America. From my spot in the relative isolation of a small town in the conservative, rural hinterlands of the Northwest, one thing is clear: D.C. think tanks, national commentators and urban sophisticates have no monopoly on thoughtful, nuanced contributions to this important debate.
I don't watch television or listen to talk radio. When I want to gauge the mood and level of interest of average folks, I turn to the letters pages of local newspapers to see what people are thinking and writing.
Here in Sandpoint, the letters page of the Bonner County Daily Bee is a place where people let it all hang out. As in many small towns, almost every letter gets published. The only exception is for those writers who try to monopolize the space. No one gets more than one letter a month.
As with most newspapers, local topics dominate. It has been a welcome surprise to open the Bee on many recent mornings and find the war debate going on in my little town.
"War is something to prevent, not something to desire," a local letter writer concluded not long ago. That same day, another writer took an opposite point of view, urging Americans to "shake loose the ghosts of Vietnam once and for all."
No name-calling, no bombast. Old labels — warmonger, peacenik, hawk and dove — seem largely absent from the current national conversation, at least as it is playing out on letters pages.
Spokane is decidedly unlike Seattle in political leanings, but a surprising (to me) number of letter writers have raised questions about the rationale for war against Iraq.
I'm not alone in my surprise about Spokane-area letter writers being wary of this war. The long-time editor of the Spokesman-Review's opinion section said he is intrigued, too, because it doesn't fit his perception of the area's conservatism. Spokane is home to Washington state's 5th Congressional District, a reliably conservative Republican electorate.
Perhaps, he suggested, the silent majority is staying out of the debate while Spokane's academic and religious liberals are speaking out.
Maybe he's right. Letters pages are not polls, after all, and the pollsters tell us that 65 percent of Americans support the president's war plan. Or do they? More about that in a minute.
What I find more interesting than the numbers, however, is the quality of the debate. Read carefully, and you can find a better war debate on the letters pages of the nation's newspapers than in the halls of Congress.
In The Seattle Times newspaper, the surprise is not that dissident letter writers outnumber war supporters, but that across the board, letters are long on reasoned arguments and short on rhetorical flourishes.
One striking aspect of this debate is what the editor of this newspaper's letters page describes as "the middle-grounders who hate the thought of war but see no alternative."
That is close to where I find myself, and not always comfortably. When it comes to war and peace, it is not easy to be a moderate.
When I argue with my husband about this, I have to remind him it's not fair to call me anti-war. I am prepared to be convinced by clearer evidence that we must be the aggressor against Saddam Hussein.
But I cannot relent on my belief that America has more to lose than gain by taking on Saddam alone, or with only Great Britain and a handful of minor nations in support.
A closer look at polling data reveals, as letters pages suggest, that support for this war is less than it first seems. According to recent polls, support falls to less than 50 percent when the prospect of large numbers of ground troops is added to the question.
Also, many share my belief that the United States should not act without the backing of the international community. As many as 65 percent say such support is very important.
I am heartened by last week's developments at the United Nations and the administration's willingness to compromise on its go-it-alone stance.
So, too, I suspect, are many thoughtful people filling the letters pages of newspapers across America. Don't tell me they aren't making a difference.
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Mindy Cameron's column appears alternate Wednesdays on editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at mindycameron@earthlink.net or write her c/o The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.
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