Less than a year after the attacks which left 3,000 Americans dead in New York and Washington, D.C., it appears that many people in this country have fallen back into a sense of complacency about terrorism.

The latest example of this is the discussions about Iraq last week in hearings conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in our nation’s capital.

The growing consensus in Washington seems to be that President George Bush needs to garner the support of Congress before launching an attack to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. A plethora of pacifists making the rounds on television talk shows is advocating every conceivable option but the use of force get rid of Saddam on grounds that we don’t want to upset our Arab allies or because Saddam may respond by using weapons of mass destruction against U.S. troopand Israel.

Never mind that few of our Arab “allies” have demonstrated that they are deserving of that designation. Saudi Arabia, for example, considered one of our leading allies in the Middle East has strong ties to the September 11 attacks and suicide bombings in Israel. Anybody who watches daily reports of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, followed by cancellation of peace talks, should realize that negotiations are futile.

All of this coddling of Iraq is starting to sound like the policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler in the days leading up to World War II. Had the Allied Powers taken Hitler out when he was first perceived as a threat to the rest of the world hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved.

Saddam invited an attack upon his country four years ago when he expelled United Nations weapons inspectors. That in itself is an act of war. Amid the renewed discussion of a strike on Iraq he has offered to reopen talks with U.N. inspectors in what is nothing more than a veiled attempt to buy himself more time.

We are with Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, who believes the time to act against Iraq is sooner rather than later. Lieberman testified in the Iraq hearings that he believes every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons and the development of nuclear weapons the risk of another catastrophe increases for the United States, Israel, and the rest of the world. R.S.