READER'S QUESTION
A reader asked me whether I was "waxing hyperbolic" when I said Saddam was the greatest threat to world peace.  My response:

Not hyperbolic exactly. Let's put it this way: I don't think it would be possible to pin down who or what is "the greatest threat to world peace." For many reasons.

Define peace. Does peace mean that no organized armies are fighting each other? Or does it mean that people can do what they want without fear of violence? Is it peace if a dictator has the right to kill anyone he likes at will, and is inclined to do so quite readily, but his subjects are so abject that they never give him the slightest occasion for it? What if he starves them instead of shooting them-- is that a famine, but still "peaceful"? Is it peace if there is a high crime rate? If crime is not a breach of the peace, where is the line between terrorism and crime?

Define world peace, then. Does world peace mean the absence of world war, or an absence of war all over the world? If there is a civil war in the Congo killing millions of people, but people in rich countries who write and read and comprise "public opinion" don't know about it, is that world peace? If countries arm against each other and are on the very brink of war perpetually, yet are held in check by a balance of mutual fear, is that world peace?

Furthermore, is world peace a good thing? To clarify, unless we adopt an unreasonably idealistic definition of world peace, there are presumably many versions of it, ranging from a world of robust civic freedom governed by strong, effective, honest and peace-loving governments, to a world in which dictators maintain the subjection of their cowering populaces through a low but persistent level of arbitrary violence while maintaining stability among themselves by mutual fear. Are some forms of world peace (much) better than others? If so, are certain states of war better than certain states of world peace? If so, to go further, does the phrase "world peace" have inescapably positive connotations in our discourse, and are these connotations perhaps question-begging and harmful?

In my post, I was talking about the economy, and suggesting that the extraordinary boom in world economic growth in the past year (the fastest worldwide economic growth in 20 years, if I'm not mistaken) owes a good deal to the fact that people were no longer worrying about the looming war between the US and Iraq. For those purposes, it doesn't matter whether Saddam or the US was the "greatest threat to world peace"; my point was more that the situation was the greatest threat to world peace, which I think is surely true, however the blame for the situation be distributed between Saddam and the coalition.

Blog can push you in philosophic directions that traditional journalism is immune to.  Some say it's the wave of the future.  I hope so.