As the United States prepares, through diplomacy and initial troop deployments, for a military response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, religious, pacifist and anti-globalization organizations are quickly putting together a new "peace movement" that will be launched on a variety of college campuses today. According to The Washington Post, "over 1,200 members of the National Council of Churches and a diverse coalition organized by Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and Rosa Parks" is working to mobilize Americans to oppose a "military solution" to the terrorist attacks. The effort will apparently reach its climax at a "major peace event" in Washington on September 30, the day when anti-globalization forces had originally planned to disrupt the now-canceled meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

We, too, oppose any sort of "indiscriminate" military action in the Middle East or elsewhere that would lower the United States to the moral level of the terrorists. We, too, hope any military action will be strictly limited in scope to what is necessary to eliminate the terrorist network that attacked us on September 11. And we, too, believe the object of military action should be to end the violence, not simply to wreak vengeance for our losses.

But some of the "peace" advocates appear to be adopting a pernicious logic of moral equivalence that suggests the United States "caused" the terrorist attacks by displeasing those who oppose our values and our presence around the world, and that any serious military response will give them even greater cause to strike again. One of the students planning today's campus events told The Post: "There's pretty much a consensus among students in this group that we want to prevent the continuation of the cycle of violence by averting war."

Suppose that one week after the Japanese attack on Peal Harbor Americans had begun demonstrating against any "excessive" military response, and had instead called on Franklin D. Roosevelt to work towards ending the "cycle of violence." After all, the Japanese Empire was seriously aggrieved by America's threats to interfere with its oil supplies and its ongoing rape of China. Nazi Germany, which declared war on the United States the day after Pearl Harbor, also had serious grievances against American cooperation with Allied efforts to interfere with Germany's desire for "living space" and the destruction of European Jewry. Should the United States have sought to end the "cycle of violence" by avoiding participation in World War II?

The people who planned and executed the attack on the United States on September 11 are not morally equivalent to the leadership of the United States in their resort to violence: they are morally equivalent to the war criminals who launched the attack on Pearl Harbor, and to their Axis allies in Europe.

The simple truth that peace advocates need to understand is that the only way to end the current violence, to reduce the threat of widespread killings of innocents, and to restore peace, is to destroy the terrorist network that launched the attacks on September 11. The clearly stated political objectives of bin Laden and his associates are to expel the United States entirely from the Middle East, which means abandoning Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States to another invasion by the genocidal maniac Saddam Hussein, and cooperating in the destruction of Israel. These are clearly unacceptable and morally despicable terms for the United States. Our military action should be carefully calibrated to do nothing more or less than is necessary to prevent the terrorist network from striking again. And anything less than military action will clearly fail to have any effect at all.

We all share a desire for peace, and deplore any unnecessary death. But it's very important to make it clear that there is no "cycle of violence" at play here: September 11 was an unprovoked and brutal attack on the United States by people who cannot be appeased -- and can only be stopped by force of arms and the united sentiments of the civilized world. A "peace" effort aimed at tying our hands will simply strengthen the hands of the terrorists. Denying the United States the right of self-defense out of sentiment for peace could be quite literally suicidal.