Support for the War Under Attack

Re “Antiwar Ouija Boards,” Commentary, Oct. 21: Max Boot quotes statements by Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Edward Kennedy, President Jimmy Carter, presidential advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and columnist Robert Novak, who all warned that the 1991 war to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait could lead to a larger conflict for which we were not prepared. They were right and President George H.W. Bush knew it.

Those who thought that we should have continued on to overthrow Hussein in Iraq were wrong then and they were wrong now. George W. Bush, the younger and immature, had no understanding of the contingencies his preemptive war demanded.

But Boot suggests that this president can succeed and denies the truth about casualties and costs in an unnecessary war that was based on false intelligence.

The constantly changing reasons for this war with every new evidence of malfeasance, lack of planning, lack of support for our troops and not enough manpower to protect ourselves or to stabilize the country are all proof of failure on a catastrophic scale.

Max looks through the same rose-colored neocon glasses issued to all Bush sycophants.

Morton Kurzweil

Margate, Fla.

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The real test in your ongoing support of this war is: Are you willing to encourage your own children to join the armed forces and fight there? The answer for many neocon chicken hawks is silence.

It seems OK for others to die for your philosophy, but not your own family. When I’ve asked pro-Bush friends the same question, they seem stunned. Let’s wave the flag as “others” die for us. But then they say, “But what about those tax cuts?”

Harry Schwarz

Agoura Hills

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In Michael Ramirez’s disingenuous portrayal of Washington’s crossing the Delaware (editorial cartoon, Oct. 21), soldiers are questioning their own safety. Let me point out just a couple of annoying facts for Ramirez. Bush was not leading the mission to supply contaminated fuel in unarmored, broken-down vehicles. The soldiers who crossed the Delaware with Washington did so in an effort to win their own freedom from tyranny, not impose their beliefs on another people in an occupied country in an unjust war based upon false evidence and duplicitous promises from the commander in chief.

Ramirez used to be a favorite satirist of mine, but as this last year has progressed, and the “mission accomplished” war has ground on and on, Ramirez shows us time and again that he is nothing more than a hack partisan cheerleader for the Bush regime.

Scott W. Hughes

Westlake Village