Allied Victory in Mideast War

Tom Clancy’s jingoistic claptrap (“How About a Few Parades,” Commentary, Feb. 28) carries self-righteous Americanism to more hyperbolic extremes than previous right-wing raptures over Grenada and Panama. The fact, however, is that this war produced neither heroes nor strategic geniuses because it wasn’t even a real war. It was a ruthless, relentless attack by the most powerful armed force in history against an innocent civilian population and an embarrassingly inferior adversary whose rhetorical description (fourth largest force led by a modern Hitler intent on Middle East conquest and then--dare we contemplate it--the world) was a fatuous exaggeration.

Deaf, dumb and blind within the first 48 hours, virtually unable to defend itself and remorselessly bombed for 42 days, the vaunted Iraqi “military machine” (a ridiculous euphemism if there ever was one) was ultimately revealed to be a bunch of sitting ducks at a Western shooting match, manned by a ragtag group of quivering conscripts, kissing the hands of their captors and begging for kindness and sanctuary. This is not the kind of enemy that I feel proud to have defeated.

Rather than a parade, we need to hold a wake for the death of honest self-reflection: the refusal of Americans to recognize the sophistry that permits the likes of Bush to commit raw, naked aggression of unprecedented ferocity against a country the size of New Mexico in order to demonstrate the futility of raw, naked aggression.

SPENCER CARLSEN

Granada Hills