Who's Your Daddy?
The clique of conservative intellectuals pushing the war has labeled Colin Powell and the Bush I crowd wimpy "appeasers."

Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol echo the message of Eliot Cohen, author of "Supreme Command": "As Lord Salisbury said, `If you ask the soldiers, nothing is safe.' To which the politicians must respond, `Neither is inaction.' "

They paint the military brass as wimpy. "Powell did not want to do Bosnia," said a whack-Iraq'er. "The Pentagon was reluctant on Kosovo. On Iraq, Powell and Schwarzkopf dragged their feet on the first war. And the civilians are right this time, too. Iraq has had 11 years to comply with cease-fire arrangements on weapons of mass destruction."

The military types snipe back that the loudly squawking hawks — Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle — are war wimps. "All the generals see it the same way," said the retired Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni, a Powell adviser, "and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another way."

And Senator Chuck Hagel, a hero in Vietnam, chimed in: "Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad." (Maybe he would.)

Giving a new definition of chutzpah, the conservatives pushing for war began taunting W., saying he had gone too far on Iraq to turn back now without being a wimp.

"The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said," Mr. Perle said, "would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism." Or: Nice little administration you have here; pity if something should happen to it.

The Bushies figured if they went after Saddam, whom they could find, as opposed to the vanished Osama, they would not seem wimpy.

But the more the president let Dick Cheney make the case for him, the more he risked being seen as wimpy. He was saved only by the Democrats, silent all summer, too wimpy to take on the White House and carve out their own case on Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/04/opinion/04DOWD.html