A historian should know his civil wars

Re “Obama’s antiwar audacity,” Opinion, Feb. 19

Painfully missing in Niall Ferguson’s column concerning Democratic presidential candidate and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s stated position on withdrawing from Iraq is the continued escalation of Iraqi deaths; depending on your source, that figure could be in the hundreds of thousands. Is this our reason for staying, to get an accurate body count?

Also missing is how horribly our rebuilding efforts have fared under Washington’s inept leadership. There have been billions of dollars paid to U.S. companies with little to show in the improvement of Iraqi infrastructure. Is this our reason for staying, to line the pockets of American CEOs?

Sudan, Lebanon, Rwanda -- all are civil wars not started with a cavalier and preemptive invasion by the United States. Here is our reason for leaving: What we did was, and continues to be, wrong.

STEPHEN S. ANDERSON

Hacienda Heights

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Ferguson insinuates that there is little or no difference between intervening in Iraq’s civil war and the genocide in Darfur. If Ferguson were not a professor in history, I would chalk his statements up to naivete. Iraq is a sectarian-based civil war between well-armed combatants who are supported by foreign governments on both sides.

Given the fact that our technologically superior American troops are losing control of this battlefield, it is prudent that we reassess our position, ramp up diplomacy and begin moving U.S. troops out of harm’s way.

Darfur is a fundamentally different conflict, much like the chaos in Liberia in which its criminal president, Charles Taylor, intentionally destabilized his own country. Government-backed militias in Sudan are attacking defenseless villages and ethnically cleansing the region in order to control the land. Intervention would stop this tragedy in short order.

JOSEPH T. COLLINS

Austin, Texas