The elusive truth about the war in Iraq

In your Aug. 23 editorial, “The war of words,” you correctly state that we need to measure progress as our presence in Iraq cannot be open-ended.

You ask how many Iraqi troops and police must be trained before U.S. troops can be withdrawn?

You should be asking and reporting how many Iraqi troops have to date been trained and, more important, how many trained Iraqi troops are actually serving actively alongside American troops?

Each day we hear about U.S. soldiers dying, but I fail to hear how many Iraqi soldiers have died.

After all these many months of hearing the Bush administration talk about the training of Iraqi soldiers, you should be asking, where are they?

VINCENT J. CAROLLO

Upland

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Bush’s optimism about the Iraqi situation is more fantastic than hopeful. Terrorism has increased in Iraq since the U.S. invasion.

Political tensions between Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis have become more pronounced.

The oil markets are more volatile.

The morale in the U.S. military is declining. The objectives of the U.S. foreign policy regarding Iraq are more opaque.

So, regarding Bush’s optimism, which should be based on a hope of things that might be, most of us see the Bush fantasy, which is based on things that never were, are or will be.

CHRIS MOLLING

Towson, Md.

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In your editorial “The war of words” you reassert the administration contention that setting a deadline for withdrawal would be a mistake because it would allow insurgents to wait for the U.S. withdrawal before increasing their suicide bombings.

This assertion is flawed on two counts.

First, if this statement were true, wouldn’t the insurgents simply use that tactic now and go into hiding, leaving Iraq with a false sense of security, and launch their attacks when U.S. soldiers leave?

Second, it is widely known that the U.S. presence in Iraq is used to recruit new insurgents and has become the very reason for many of the attacks on American troops by both foreign and Iraqi fighters.

The only successes achieved in Iraq have come by adhering to strict deadlines to reach concrete goals, and the same principle should be used in developing a coherent exit strategy.

TIM GRANEY

Van Nuys