WASHINGTON -- In the summer of 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked me to lunch at the Occidental Restaurant in downtown Washington. He was resigning as an assistant secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration to run, unsuccessfully, for City Council president of New York. He had something to give me: his 79-page Labor Department report, based on Census Bureau statistics that exposed the breakdown of the African-American family.

Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz refused Moynihan's request to release the report that showed broken homes, female-oriented households, and especially rampant illegitimacy among blacks negated increased federal spending. The report had been leaked earlier, but the column about it by my late partner, Rowland Evans, and me first connected it with the 38-year-old liberal intellectual and aspiring Democratic politician. The column of Aug. 18, 1965, titled "The Moynihan Report," triggered unremitting conflict between him and his party's dominant left wing.

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America is the most secure nation on earth -- and the most insecure. The war in Iraq baffles the rest of the world because it reflects our tendency to see urgent perils that others don't. We spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. But we regard Saddam Hussein, the beleaguered dictator of a small, poor, faraway nation, as a threat too great to tolerate.

This is a different kind of war from what the world is used to. In Afghanistan, we were pursuing an enemy that had killed thousands of Americans. But Iraq hasn't attacked the United States, hasn't threatened to attack the United States, has nothing to gain by attacking the United States, and hasn't acquired the capacity to do us any serious harm. The Bush administration has gone to war solely because Iraq might, someday, put us at risk.

CLICK HERE to read this Steve Chapman article.