Bush’s Call to War Needs Clarification

If Saddam Hussein really is a mortal threat who will have a nuclear bomb “fairly soon,” then our present administration has been pitifully negligent in presenting its evidence to the U.N. and to the Congress (Aug. 27).

If he is indeed the imminent danger that Vice President Dick Cheney says, then why has President Bush gone on record to say that no imminent attack is planned? Can’t the president get a clear message to the country and the world?

Douglas L. Hall

Los Angeles

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I do not recommend charging into Iraq to remove Hussein. It is true we could easily win the war, but what afterward? Whom do we replace him with?

The choices I see are even less desirable than he is. The infighting would undo all we set out to do, and in the end the winners would probably be fundamentalists who would be even less inclined to help us. We have to face the fact that there are no good choices; rather, it’s the lesser of evils in that part of the world. Sometimes, as the old adage goes, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.

Anthony T. Dunn

San Diego

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Thank you for your Aug. 27 editorial, “First Stop on Road to Iraq.” So far, all I hear is fear talk without any evidence. The Bush team, for going to war on Iraq, is creating a distraction from the issues that need attention from the American public. The things that Bush doesn’t want the American people to think about are the corporate scandals, the failed drug war, the overcrowding of our prisons, the severe need for health care for a major part of our people, the providing of lower costs for prescriptions (especially for our senior citizens), the need for low-cost housing for our poorer population, and a litany of other necessary things: providing repairs to our streets and highways, improving our transit systems for our cities and extending money to prevent the closures of our emergency rooms. I could go on and on. It is a sham to drum up a boogeyman so the American people will be so frightened that they will not think about our real problems.

All the protests are coming from Republicans. Why are the Democrats fearful of speaking up? As with Vietnam, they will be sorry when our soldiers come back in body bags. More Americans--Democrats and independents alike (as well as wise Republicans)--must stand up to these bullies.

Jack Gilman

West Hollywood

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The whole debate about whether or not to go to war with Iraq is silly and purely academic. Of course there will be another war with Iraq. The president has discovered that war is good for his approval ratings, and presidents named Bush don’t know how to do anything else but wage war.

George W. Serbia

Irvine