Who wants a war against Iraq? Adam Gregory (Oct. 30 letter) said that being a patriot means being one of the sheep who follows our government to war.

Let's put the question of what it means to be a patriot aside for now and just look at the facts.

This summer, a majority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, and CIA director George Tenet all said that a war with Iraq is not a good idea (The Washington Post, 8/1/02). I believe that these people know something about it. I suspect that they know more than President Bush. If these people don't want to go to war, why does Bush? Whom should the sheep follow?

Since this summer, the White House has publicly admitted that it has no proof of a connection between terrorism and Iraq.

At the same time, there was consensus among military intelligence that Iraq doesn't have nuclear weapons (The Washington Post, 9/9/02). The consensus among people who know something about Iraq is that bombing it is not just morally bad, but it's also politically, economically and militarily bad -- for us.

The peace marchers last weekend aren't the extremists. They are the norm. The war hawks are the extremists who ignore the rather obvious facts.

Nobody is defending Saddam Hussein. What both the peace marchers and our own military are defending is our democratic right to make smart decisions about complicated problems.