Earlier this week I was flipping through the channels on cable and stumbled upon a very interesting documentary on PBS named "The Case for War: In Defense of Freedom". The show is part of a larger series of documentaries titled America at a Crossroads. In "The Case for War", Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle "travels the globe articulating, defending and debating the neoconservative case for an assertive American foreign policy."

I found the show particularly interesting because it didn't try to glorify the case for war along political lines or belittle opponents of the war. Rather, it treated the issues and the people involved with a great deal of respect. And it includes numerous conversations Perle had with those who strongly disagree with his point of view, including family members of veterans who died in the war.

Some of the more prominent individuals he speaks with include

• Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of Arabic newspaper Al Quds, one of the few journalists who has interviewed Osama Bin Laden
• Simon Jenkins, a British journalist and author who writes a column twice weekly for the Guardian and disagrees strongly with Perle's opinions
• Patrick Buchanan, a former Republican politician and current news pundit. Buchanan also disagrees with Perle's necon views.
• Natan Sharansky, one of the founders and the spokesman of Jewish and the Refusenik movement in Moscow who was arrested and in July 1978 convicted on charges of treason and spying for the United States and sentenced to 13 years of forced labor. Sharansky shares many of Perle's neoconservative views, including the belief that countries in which liberty and democracy have been seriously hampered should be "forcedly democratized".
• Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who helped broker a peace agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia that led to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, in 1995. Holbrook strongly disagrees with Perle's neoconservative ideals.

The library has books written by or about many of the men listed above. Here are a few:

• An end to evil : how to win the war on terror / David Frum, Richard Perle.
• Where the right went wrong : how neoconservatives subverted the Reagan revolution and hijacked the Bush presidency / Patrick J. Buchanan.
• To end a war / Richard Holbrooke.

Sources
Sharansky quote: "Natan Sharansky, the ideologist of forced democratization", http://www.voltairenet.org/article30245.html, viewed on June 22, 2007.