By Paul A. Anthony, Editor in Chief

The nation’s vocal minority has been an ever-present, ever-comical sidelight in our nation’s media for the past month. Drowned out has been the classic “silent majority,” the recently polled 72 percent who support a war with Iraq sooner rather than later.

Sometimes that majority holds pro-war marches. But usually its members have been content to watch pretentious celebrities and ignorant activists spout clich‚s and platitudes. The majority instead will make its voice heard in November 2004.

The time is now, however, for those who are racing to prevent the 4,000-day “rush to war.”

And given such a platform for their voices-weeks of open press time in America, an openly sympathetic European media structure, big-money anti-America/Israel backing-war critics have chosen to squander it on flawed, hypocritical, ineffectual whining.

Perhaps the most telling sign in the comedy of errors paraded through the anti-war camp: “It about brings me to tears, the thought that women and children are going to be killed in this war,” said one New Hampshire protester this weekend.

So let us talk about women and children for a minute.

Female and young relatives of political dissidents are tortured themselves as a part of everyday life. Here is what Amnesty International has described what happens to such victims in Iraq:

* They are “blindfolded, stripped of their clothes and suspended from their wrists for long hours.”

* Electric shock is “used on various parts of their bodies, including the genitals, ears, the tongue and fingers.”

* Their hands are pierced through with an electric drill.

* They are sexually molested with various objects, including broken bottles.

* They are raped.

This goes along with the usual torture methods: cigarette burns, canes, whips, ripping out finger- and toenails. Tongue amputation has recently been added to the list.

These practices-used against women and children on a daily basis-continue. Amnesty International recently reported that a 2-year-old had her feet partially crushed in front of her dissident father.

Thousands of women and children have been raped, tortured and murdered by Saddam Hussein’s own troops, yet the blindly pacifistic weep for those who will be killed in a war that has been delayed by UN apathy for more than a decade.

Twelve years and 17 resolutions after Saddam Hussein’s evil resulted in international action, the United Nations has looked away and allowed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents. Yet the vocal minority weeps not for those.

Enough is enough. War has come to this vile, despicable man’s doorstep; let it begin now.