Can a patriot have misgivings about attacking Iraq? Is opposition limited to peaceniks and American-hating multiculturalists?

Wars have unintended consequences. Would an American invasion of an Arab country further radicalize the Islamic world, leading to the rise of unfriendly governments in Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia? Would the U.S. then have to invade a hostile Pakistan because of its nuclear weapons?

The terrorist threat comes from radical Islam. Saddam Hussein runs a secular state. Would overthrowing a secular ruler help or harm radical Islam?

An American attack on Iraq would cause a loss of sympathy among our European allies. Would a more isolated America receive the same cooperation in the battle against terror?

War hawks believe that a demonstration of U.S. military clout would improve the Middle Eastern situation. But Israel has been demonstrating clout for decades and is still engulfed by terrorism.

No doubt Saddam Hussein bears the U.S. ill will, and he may be acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Nevertheless, is the level of threat to the U.S. from a country of 23 million relatively poor and uneducated people blown out of proportion?

If the U.S. is to adopt the Roman approach of overthrowing enemies before they arise, the U.S. should focus on China, a much greater potential threat. Ambitious China has the world's largest population and weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton administration gave China the missile technology required to reach American cities. U.S. firms, seeking lower costs, are building up China's high-tech industrial capacity.

Sound arguments can be made that the focus on Iraq is preventing more serious vulnerabilities from being addressed. Terrorists abroad do us less damage than the terrorists allowed into our country by our open-borders policy.

The U.S. is so politically correct that it no longer differentiates between illegal aliens and native-born citizens. Author and columnist Georgie Anne Geyer has shown that open borders have turned American citizenship into an empty concept.

If you believe that the U.S. has borders, read columnist Michelle Malkin's just released book, Invasion. Mrs. Malkin shows that aliens' rights trump both citizens' rights and citizens' safety.

No effort is made to control our borders. Mrs. Malkin reports that in the six months following the September 11 attacks, the State Department issued almost 200,000 additional visas to Middle Easterners and southern Asians, areas that are known havens for al Qaeda. People without visas enter unhindered from Canada and Mexico.

Visas continue to be granted indiscriminately even though the State Department knows that a high percentage will overstay their visas and disappear into the population. The U.S. has become such a hodgepodge of different peoples and cultures that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has washed its hands of locating and deporting illegal aliens.

Can a country conduct a war on terror when it cannot control its own borders? Does it make sense for a country that refuses to defend its own borders to invade another country?

American universities have repeatedly made it clear that their multicultural goal is to prevent students from being enculturated into Western civilization. What does a people stripped of its identity defend?

The U.S. may be in more danger from the extraordinary imbalance in the political and ideological commitments of its university faculties than it is from Saddam Hussein. Time and age will destroy Hussein. But university faculties are self-selecting and self-perpetuating, and these faculties are overwhelmingly hostile to traditional American values and any political party that stands for these values.

An article in the current issue of The American Enterprise magazine, "The Shame of America's One-Party Campuses," shows the ratio of left-wing to conservative professors in a number of universities.

At Cornell the ratio is 27 to 1. At Harvard it is 25 to 1. The ratio is 35 to 1 at Denver College, 23 to 1 at the University of Colorado, 50 to 1 at Williams College, 72 to 1 at the University of California at Santa Barbara, 25 to 1 at Syracuse University, 8 to 1 at Berkeley, 15 to 1 at UCLA, 35 to 1 at the State University of New York at Binghamton, 9 to 1 at Stanford, and 10 to 1 at Davidson College.

And some people think the problem is in Iraq?

Paul Craig Roberts is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice

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