American Hawks Are Circling Iraq

The hawks in the Bush administration are apparently planning full-scale military action against Saddam Hussein.

Very plausible consequences of such action would be: 1) The United States launches an air and land assault. 2) Iraq attacks Israel with Scud missiles. 3) Israel responds with a full air assault on Iraq. 4) The Arab nations erupt into total chaos; regimes topple in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and Jordan. 5) Middle East oil supplies to the West are totally disrupted and Hussein remains hidden like the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and who was that other guy Bush said he would get dead or alive?

Wally Armstrong

Torrance

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Derek Chollet (Commentary, July 28) wisely advocates a congressional discussion with regard to the potential of an American preemptive strike against Iraq, then proceeds to posit the outrageous contention that if Congress were to debate this issue, the vote in support of this would not be in question--that “barring some catastrophe, Congress will support the president. The question is not whether to act against Hussein, but when and how.”

But indeed, that is exactly the question. The support of the Congress, or the American people, is not a given, nor should it be. In this bizarre time that capitalizes on a false appeal to blind patriotism, we have drifted into a haze of nonconfrontational complicity and are allowing our foreign policy to be directed not by the State Department but by the Defense Department. There are voices, not only in our own government and nation but in the world community, that definitely do not see the option of attacking Iraq as the only one. Empowering Secretary of State Colin Powell, with his current judicious, tempered approach to the world’s problems, would be wiser than giving President Bush and his cowboy soldiers carte blanche.

The outcome of a discussion and debate in Congress should not be a forgone conclusion, otherwise we can no longer pride ourselves on being a healthy, participative democracy.

Elizabeth Gill Lui

Los Angeles