Tea and Sympathy Grow Less Refined

Re “Ladies’ Tea Boils Over as Saudis Rail at U.S.,” March 27: I’d say our embassy personnel put up a pretty lame defense against the Saudi women taking our country to task for seeking to oust the despot next door. Instead of saying “we came to the belief that this was something we needed to do,” how about saying this: In 1991, Saddam Hussein brutally annexed Kuwait. If the U.S. hadn’t spent its own blood to drive him out, your country would have been next. And if any of you had been lucky enough to escape, right now you would probably be living in asylum in America. Meanwhile, we’re not going to sit by and wait for Hussein to have the means to bring to us the kind of grief he unleashed on Kuwait.

Robert Chandler

Beverly Hills

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Re the March 27 Column One about a Palestinian family and the tea article: Thoughtful people in the Arab world feel the disconnect between Americans and their government regarding the war in Iraq. I feel it in Los Angeles. Why can’t President Bush feel it -- or does he, and just doesn’t care?

Anna Roberts

Los Angeles

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Re “ ‘Every Day Gets Worse and Worse,’ ” March 27: On a day in which it became clear that U.S. soldiers had been shot execution-style while in Iraqi captivity, that several thousand chemical suits and nerve agent antidotes had been uncovered in an Iraqi hospital and that Iraqi paramilitary forces are being used to shoot unwilling combatants and sympathetic civilians, front-page news in The Times is how Iraqi civilians are suffering at the hands of the U.S. military.

Even in a war that will probably set a new standard in the history of warfare for low civilian casualties when compared with the size and scope of force being employed, The Times becomes the mouthpiece of the Iraqi Information Ministry. I’m certain Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz couldn’t be happier with your reporting.

David Weir

Thousand Oaks

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I applaud your article “Every Day Gets Worse and Worse,” for its accurate depiction of the daily suffering the Iraqi people are going through because of the war. We often forget that we are all human beings. We forget that the children of Iraq have names, faces and dreams. If this same pain and suffering was inflicted on our friends and family, or any American, we would not let it happen.

Ghayth Adhami

Corona

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One day soon the Iraqi people will have to answer one simple question for themselves: Does Iraq want a regime like Hussein’s returned to power?

Jim Ketcham

Malibu