Baker Deployed to Solve Iraq’s Debt Problem

“Bush Taps Baker for Iraq Task” (Dec. 6), about former secretary of State James A. Baker III and the attempt to thrash out the Iraqi debt muddle, avoided an agonizing question. Isn’t a world society in which a bloody tyrant can be showered with such enormous sums of money utterly intolerable?

Most people have never murdered, robbed, raped, tortured or enslaved anybody, and they have trouble getting a car loan. Saddam Hussein and his henchmen committed these crimes many thousands of times over for three decades and they were bankrolled by the international community to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The lenders shouldn’t be worrying about how much of this dirty money they’ll get back; they should be worrying about being indicted for complicity in crimes against humanity.

Gilbert Dewart

Pasadena

*

So President Bush feels that “the future of the Iraqi people should not be mortgaged to the enormous burden of debt incurred to enrich Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

If only the president was half as concerned about the debt his regime is incurring on us.

Bill Seibel

Glendora

*

It appears my hard-earned tax dollars are being diverted from the U.S. to Iraq so we can rebuild a nation that we had to destroy before they destroyed us (not). Saudi Arabia, home to most of the 9/11 terrorists who actually did try to destroy us, is owed billions by Iraq. My contribution will help oil-rich Iraq repay its debt to the oil-rich Saudis. The Saudis have refused to forgive Iraqi debt, canceled their reconstruction assistance, forced our president to remove Saudi-based U.S. military, done little to confront terrorism roots and are most happy that their ally, Bush, pivoted the war on terrorism from Afghanistan to Iraq and not to them.

The oil-rich, secretive Bush administration continues to serve the extremist and undemocratic Saudi oligarchy. President Bush, who benefits from your agenda?

Bill Rolfing

Laguna Beach

*

The subhead of John W. Dower’s Dec. 8 commentary, “History in the Remaking,” reads: “Bush’s comparison of Iraq with postwar Japan ignores the facts.”

Well, why shouldn’t it? He ignored the facts in the pre-invasion buildup (no WMD, no yellowcake uranium, no ties to Al Qaeda or 9/11), and he ignored the facts during the invasion itself (“Mission Accomplished!”). So it’s only fitting that his view of the current occupation (“faster than similar efforts in Germany and Japan”) should be just as wrong.

Barry Gold

Los Angeles