Iraq War: Standards and Double Standards

“Bush Has Presented No Evidence to Launch a War” (Dec. 20) contains letters from the antiwar crowd and not one letter from the majority who think that a war might be justified to prevent a madman from creating nuclear blackmail, or worse. It’s not up to President Bush to prove that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, it’s up to Saddam Hussein to prove it doesn’t.

Is no one writing about the possibility that if we do overthrow the Hussein regime there would be dancing in the streets of Baghdad, like there was in Kabul this year, in Kuwait 10 years ago and in Paris in 1945? Why do pacifists fail to understand the horrendous bloody lessons of prior generations?

War is never sought, but it’s not always the wrong course of action.

Steven Rothenberg

Venice

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So, Bush is rattling the sabers again. This man, who was not elected and who used family connections to get out of serving in Vietnam, is pushing harder than ever to send us and the world into war. This war against Iraq that Bush wants so badly has nothing to do with freeing the Iraqi people, fighting terrorism, eliminating weapons of mass destruction or solving the Mideast’s problems. It is about settling old scores, winning elections, forcing the world to accept the U.S. as an absolute power and reaping oil profits.

It is also a distraction, keeping our minds off the crashing economy, corporate layoffs and payoffs, the lack of real progress against terrorism, the decimation of our environmental laws, the loss of our privacy and freedoms and retrenchment in our government by the far right, with its anti-woman and racist agendas. An attack on Iraq by the U.S. that is perceived as being without justification will cause more terrorism.

Charles Mark-Walker

North Hills

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Surprise, surprise; the administration found the Iraq report insufficient (Dec. 19). Wasn’t that a given? Every year the U.S. is missing enough equipment to supply a full battalion with small arms, but Iraq -- a Third World country that has been bombed continuously for the last 10 years -- can’t find every nail and screw that the U.S. government believes it has (because the U.S. sold Iraq those nails and screws). Our double standard is just unbelievable.

Joan E. Meijer

Los Angeles