Sometimes it helps to get outraged: David Bonior is passionate about issues. That's one of the reasons he visited Iraq. Now he's on the receiving end of a lot of anger - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 25, 2002 by Joe Feuerherd

The straight-talker resorted to a little spin. "The vote indicates that the president did not make his case very well, that war is not the answer and that we've got to allow the opportunity for unrestricted inspections to take place."

Perhaps. But Bonior is not optimistic that message will be heeded: "The administration is bent on a war." And Bonior, for one, thinks war--this war, right now--is a potentially huge miscalculation. "This could get very bad. The world community is as brittle as I've seen it in my 30 years in public life. I'm very concerned about the dynamics of what could occur here. I don't want to say that this is going to turn out to be another Guns of August and 1914 all over again, but it has that potential."

Bonior warned: "There are many places in the world that are tinderboxes." Among them: Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and India, Chechnya and Taiwan. "This really has the potential to set a lot of things off," Bonior said. "We could be fighting on five or six fronts in a very short time."

What does Bonior make of the fact that each of the Democratic senators mentioned as potential 2004 presidential candidates--Joe Biden of Delaware, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, John Edwards of North Carolina, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut--supported the war resolution? What happened to the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party?

He refused the bait: "You'll have to ask them."

Have politicians gone soft, running to the mushy middle out of fear of alienating key constituencies? "Yes," said Bonior. "It's about having power rather than leading. There is a difference."

"The extra dimension of leading takes more work, more insight and more toughness," he continued. "Somebody once said if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room. If you don't use your political capital to lead then no one gets led and you end up talking around problems."

Partially to blame, said Bonior, is the media. "They don't like this tension between people who have differing views; they think it should all be conducted with pure civility. To the extent that you can do that, of course that's advisable, but when you're dealing with issues of passion, war and peace, life and death--justice issues--it helps sometimes to get outraged."