The President’s Take on the WMD Issue

Re “Bush Takes In Iraq From 31,000 Feet,” June 6: President Bush was correct when he said that “no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the Iraqi regime is no more.” Instead, terrorists can pick up WMD from the looters of the nuclear storage facility in Tuwaitha.

Thanks, Mr. President. The world is a much safer place now.

Dan Kolhoff

Santa Monica

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In early May, Bush declared victory in Iraq. Now we are informed that Iraqi attacks on American forces have tripled in the past month (June 6). The Greeks had a name for it: pyrrhic victory. How many more such victories can we look forward to?

Irving Stanton Elman

Pacific Palisades

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Re “Ruled by Rumors in Iraq,” June 5: So, gullible Iraqis have been taken in by outlandish rumors of U.S. soldiers ogling Muslim women with night-vision goggles and handing pornography to children, hampering efforts to impose stability in Iraq? Could it be that the Bush administration’s own wild tales of weapons of mass destruction and harrowing nighttime rescue missions might alone be sufficient to undermine U.S. credibility with the local population?

Tom Hogen-Esch

Pasadena

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Reading Max Boot’s June 5 commentary, “Blair and Bush Aren’t That Stupid,” was like a breath of fresh air. Boot, in a calm but persuasive manner, exposed the wrongheadedness of the accusations by those on the left who have claimed that the Bush administration has been duplicitous about the war in Iraq. All of the dire predictions about the consequences of the war have failed to materialize. So the detractors are now alleging that the weapons of mass destruction never really existed and that Bush and Blair have both been lying.

It would be naive to expect that those who hold negative views will be materially affected by Boot’s logic, but The Times is to be applauded for providing a much-needed balance in its editorial pages.

Herbert D. Eagle

West Los Angeles

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Boot really let his hawkish views fly in his bewildering piece about wars and the reasons we fight them. His statement, “Critics of preventive wars ... suggest that we should wait to hit back until just before we’re going to be attacked ... or just after,” is mind-boggling to any critic of our recent aggressive worldview. How can it ever be considered “hitting back” if we strike before we’ve been attacked? And as for preventive wars, didn’t we learn any lessons in the “war to end all wars” in 1918?

Doug Fredericksen

Corona

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The reason Saddam Hussein made bad decisions was not because he was stupid but because he surrounded himself with party loyalists, like-minded men who told him what he wanted to hear. We hear that our president is decisive, that once he makes up his mind he is all action and never looks back. We hear he prays each morning for divine guidance. We hear he puts a high premium on loyalty, that those who challenge his decisions lose their influence and his respect.

Like Hussein, our president has surrounded himself with yes men, who curry his favor by finding the facts needed to sell his decisions. Over time, intuition evolves into certainty. Bad decisions are a consequence of this management style. No, the president is not stupid and he does not lie about weapons of mass destruction. He and his loyalists truly believe they exist, and no matter what isn’t discovered in Iraq in the years to come, they always will.

Charles Milbourne

Woodland Hills

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Re “ ’04 Democrats See Plus in Iraq Weapon Hunt,” June 5: Don Sipple, Republican strategist and occasional White House advisor, states, “I think there’s enough trust and confidence in Bush’s leadership that if there was bad intelligence, people will blame the CIA.” Does this mean we should blame the CIA for the war? What happened to “The buck stops here”?

Peggy A. Ganatta

Northridge