Letters: Jan. 29, 2007

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Instead of asking whether it makes any sense to send more troops to Iraq, you should have asked whether it made sense to send troops in the first place. Even a complete idiot could see that the removal of Saddam Hussein would give rise to civil war and a bloody Shi'ite takeover. We have wasted more than $350 billion, lost another war, caused more than 50,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, reduced the country to anarchy and incurred the hatred of much of the world. And now we're proposing to continue on this insane course?

JOHN S. WHITMAN Peaks Island, Maine

Which Way Forward?

RE William Kristol's "There Is a Way Forward in Iraq" [Jan. 15]: Kristol is one among a thinning crowd of neocon true believers who still grope for some shred of justification for the worst foreign policy debacle in a generation. When he writes that the death of Saddam "might remind Americans of the fundamental justice of this war," he has convenient amnesia on a key fact. The Administration did not sell the Iraq war as a quest for justice; it sold it by telling lies about Iraq's WMD and al-Qaeda connections and imminent threats. When all those proved false, Bush and the neocons began manufacturing a series of substitute sales pitches to cover the smell of a policy that was rotten from the beginning. Kristol can keep on selling, but 3,000 U.S. lives and 46 months later, no one's buying.

TOM HITCHCOCK Tilghman, Md.

In Kristol's lofty arguments to support the "surge," he forgot to mention one thing: more troops means more deaths. He asked that we bet hundreds of billions of additional dollars and risk thousands more casualties on the faint hope that we will prevail, despite the conclusion of many Americans that the chances of success are almost nonexistent. Kristol may disagree about the odds, but the neocons have been wrong about everything in the past four years. Why should we believe them now?

SEAN DRISCOLL Spokane, Wash.

A Tyrant's Tawdry End

"Saddam's Second Life" [Jan. 15] described the brutal indignity of Saddam's hanging. As a Christian, I don't think that we have to combat barbarity with more savagery. The execution, as I see it, was an act more of revenge and hatred than of real justice. The U.S. can't repair the historical errors of the partitioning of Middle Eastern countries by choosing who should rule them now. We Westerners are not the moral cream of the crop, and our arrogant meddling will only bring more turmoil, particularly in this sensitive region.

ETIENNE RIBAGNAC Boynton Beach, Fla.

We would have done things "differently," said U.S. military spokesman Major General William B. Caldwell IV, referring to the appalling scene at Saddam's hanging. Whoever videoed the event has brought into our homes the ultimate reality of U.S. and British foreign policy in action, and it would have been no less brutal if done "differently." There is no dignity at the end of a rope at any time. Standing defiantly in the wreckage they have brought about, President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair--through their actions and inaction, words and silence--stand not apart from but shoulder to shoulder with barbarity.

ANDREW MCCREATH Aberdeen, Scotland

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