U.S. Policy Against Iraq

Re “Clinton’s Advisors Put on Defensive at Debate on Iraq,” Feb. 19: What’s wrong with this picture? Madeleine Albright, William Cohen and Samuel Berger at Ohio State University trying to offer a rationale for military action in Iraq? Could it be that the three of them and the president are without military experience? For that matter, only 9% of those in Congress have any military background whatsoever and none have sons or daughters in the military. Their voices fall mute over an increasingly unconvinced nation.

As a threat analyst for some 27 years (in the military, including Vietnam, and as an Iraq analyst and in industry), I believe the best time to have hit Iraq was a month ago, because now Iraq has surely moved its weapons of mass destruction around the country, making it even harder to hit. Unfortunately, it remains necessary to deal with Saddam Hussein’s transgressions, for he will use these weapons as a form of intimidation or for real and, like it or not, the United States is still a world leader. We should strike when it’s not expected, however, and it shouldn’t be dictated by opinion polls, either.

Iraq violated numerous rules and must pay the piper; the United States, it seems (however reluctantly), will play the tune.

BOB BAKER

Anaheim

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Why is it that a president who was an antiwar protester and a draft dodger is so eager to wage war on Iraq, and to risk the lives of American service people? What would the non-inhaling Bill of previous years have said about such unilateral action, absent any meaningful international support?

PHILIP MARSHALL

Playa del Rey

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I wonder if public support for bombing Iraqis would be as strong if the human beings we are proposing to kill were not Arabs or Muslims--the two groups it is still acceptable to hate.

JOEL FETZER

Visiting Scholar, USC Center

for International Studies