Confrontation With Iraq

* Misdirection. Magicians use it all the time. Your attention is directed at one hand while the other secretes or produces the scarf. Everything that happened, including the exact timing, was orchestrated by Saddam Hussein (“Clinton Calls Off Attack on Iraq, Says Hussein ‘Backed Down,’ ” Nov. 16). What did he manage to accomplish in terms of hiding the scarf while the rest of us were fixed on his other hand? He is a master at this game and our people are taken in, time and again, at $1.6 billion per stand-down.

Now Saddam is “offended” that we didn’t trust him in the first place. Next he will argue with the exact definition of “compliance.” He knows the consequences of keeping our forces on alert in terms of expense and discontent back home. He didn’t have to beat us in the field.

BERNARD LEHRER

Ventura

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* Why don’t we lift the embargo a bit to let Saddam sell enough oil to cover the costs of our troop deployment and then confiscate the proceeds? This way fomenting a crisis wouldn’t be totally free for him, and the cost, as opposed to bombing, would likely be more acceptable to the world community.

MARTIN G. ROSENBLATT

Los Angeles

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* Now that we have a show of force adjacent to Iraq, it is time we issued Saddam an ultimatum with a reasonable deadline to completely expose his facilities that make weapons of mass destruction or suffer military action. Now that we have a military force in the region, why can’t we lift the sanctions?

We would do well to begin amassing ground forces in Kuwait or elsewhere in order to invade Iraq and move to take out Saddam once and for all. To say we are going to undermine his government in order to remove him without giving military support to his political challengers is unfair to the latter.

KEN WHITE

Costa Mesa