Downplaying Uranium Claim as a ‘Mistake’ Insults the Public

Re “U.S. Officials Downplay ‘Mistake’ in Bush’s Speech,” July 14: One is hard-pressed to determine what is more distasteful here: the initial gaffe of President Bush saying in his State of the Union speech that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa, or the horribly arrogant and insulting spin that this “mistake” was really trivial and doesn’t change the fundamental argument.

In fact, this mistake was near the heart of the argument to invade Iraq.

At least, that is what our president led us to believe.

More-cynical citizens believe that the determination to invade really had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction but had more to do with a decade-old vendetta and a post- 9/11 desire to demonstrate dominance.

I was someone who was won over, albeit against my intuition, by the president’s arguments regarding the imminent threat posed by Iraq’s possession of WMD.

Now to hear Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice play this off as a mistake and really something kind of trivial can’t help but enrage me and make me see the fatal flaws in these people’s characters and their lack of moral fiber.

Jeff Gershoff

Topanga

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You reported that Rice responded to the charge of exaggeration and lies about reasons given for going to war by saying that the president did so “because this was a bloody tyrant, who for 12 years had defied the international community,” amassed weapons and destabilized the Middle East.

Is Rice confirming that the war had nothing to do with a threat to the U.S. or ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction? Those earlier had been cited as the reasons.

Louis Friedman

Pasadena

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As a historian who has spent much of a long career studying how presidential foreign policy decisions are made, I find the explanation that the CIA was responsible for including false allegations about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Africa in Bush’s State of the Union message less than credible.

The vital questions about this sorry affair -- who wanted to put such information in the speech in the first place and who persuaded the CIA to agree to do so because the bogus information came from British intelligence sources -- remain unanswered.

Too bad the Bush administration, whose penchant for secrecy surpasses that of any other in recent memory, won’t tell the whole truth to the American people.

Roger Dingman

Professor of History

USC

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That strange scraping sound emanating from the White House late at night since the president’s return from Africa is our chief executive frantically honing swords.

CIA Director George Tenet is but the first of many who will be required to fall upon one so that Dubya can be portrayed as an innocent observer while the truth emerges regarding why we really sent our kids to fight and die in Iraq and why we won’t be able to bring all of them home from there for years to come. “Out of the loop”: the Bush family mantra?

Bruce Burroughs

Sherman Oaks