During his Wednesday speech before military personnel at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, President George W. Bush's pro-war words were met with so many whoops and yelps that I thought I was listening to a college football game.

"We will not wait to meet this danger with firefighters and doctors and police on the streets of our own cities," the president said. "Instead we are meeting this danger today with our Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines." I could almost hear the music from the old recruiting commercial - Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines .... .

While I understand the need to keep morale high among the troops, especially because the war hasn't been the cakewalk some administration officials bragged that it would be, I cannot stand treating war in such a simplistic way.

Had the United States - with the largest military capacity ever known to mankind, and a military budget bigger than that of the next dozen or so countries combined - been fighting against an opponent who could mount a more serious counterattack, this would be an extremely sober time, with little room for boosterism.

Had coalition military forces confirmed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration could more legitimately justify a pre-emptive war. But the stockpiles are elusive, and thus the rationales keep morphing into promises to liberate the Iraqi people or democratize the Middle East. The price tag, a mere $75 billion, keeps growing.

This is nuts. Under what theory of limited, constitutional government does it become the goal of the United States to liberate every oppressed people and democratize regions that have shown absolutely no interest in any type of republican government?

Yet I shouldn't write such things.

Criticism of the war, while bombs are flying and coalition troops are under fire, makes me a "bad" American, according to a certain blow-hard commentator whose idea of tough journalism is badgering guests with comments such as, "Come on, Mr. So and So, you don't really believe blah, blah, blah."

Although he apologized for labeling as "anti-American" anti-war protesters who demonstrate during the war, Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly argued on March 3 that "I will call those who publicly criticize our country in a time of military crisis, which this is, bad Americans ... [I]t is our duty as loyal Americans to shut up once the fighting begins, unless - unless facts prove the operation wrong, as was the case in Vietnam."

That must be one of the constitutional provisions I've forgotten about - the right to shut up until someone more knowledgeable than me declares that the war is wrong.

But the populist O'Reilly's unsophisticated attempt to silence critics - and, no doubt, many of the critics of the war are annoying leftists who deserve opprobrium - ain't nothing compared to the recent work of the once-proud conservative magazine, National Review.

In the April 7 issue, David Frum - the Canadian-born Bush speechwriter who is said to have lost his job because his wife circulated emails bragging that he coined the phrase, "axis of evil" - launched a tirade against "unpatriotic conservatives," accusing them of turning their back on their country and promising to turn his back on them.

I take umbrage at the Frum attack, being a libertarian war critic and reader of some of the authors he maligns. In 18 long Internet pages (www.nationalreview.com/ frum/frum031903.asp), Frum throws every conservative and libertarian war foe into the same camp, suggesting they are racist, xenophobic and un-American.

"There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation," Frum wrote. "The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen. They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country."

Most of us are used to this crap from the political left, which is skilled at depicting its opponents as evil. But now we see that neoconservatives (the pro-war social democrats more interested in fine-tuning government than in reducing its size) are a lot like liberals, not only in their support of centralized government, but in their tactics. Frum's article is a lengthy smear that never addresses the actual critique libertarian and conservative war opponents make, such as this one made by Jeffrey Tucker, vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

"They [pro-war conservatives] don't trust the government to run the economy, our families, or our schools, but think it is just great for the U.S. to amass the largest military machine owned by any government in the history of the world, for the U.S. and its allies to be the sole nuclear monopolists, for the U.S. to slaughter people in a foreign country who have never done anything to us and spend twice that country's GDP in doing so."

Instead, Frum picks out choice quotations from anti-war conservatives and libertarians. Of course, I could compile an equally entertaining set of quotations by neoconservatives. Perhaps, as some observers have already noted, Frum should spend more time reading National Review and its online edition, where one colleague suggested the use of nuclear weapons on Mecca.

The National Review tirade isn't about argument but demonization. The pro-war right wants to intimidate into silence the anti-war right, either through unsophisticated name-calling ("bad American") or slightly more sophisticated attempts to depict conservative war opponents as conspiracy theorists and hate-mongers.

It's a stated attempt by self-styled conservatives to "police their own," much in the way that National Review once booted acolytes of Ayn Rand and John Birch out of their movement. But these conservatives have little sway anymore, and most libertarians and anti-war conservatives would be far more likely to kick David Frum in the rump than sulk away in tears at the sight of his backside.