To the Editor:
I take Charles Fried’s point that actions by elected or appointed officials doing their best but unfortunately getting it wrong on our behalf do not compare with the likes of Stalin, Hitler or Mao.
But what if it was more than that?
To this day, I’ve never heard an argument for starting the war in Iraq by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney or anyone else in the Bush administration that is compelling. The claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a stretch at the time, and when it was debunked after we invaded, the administration’s spin shifted to arguing that Saddam Hussein was evil and then to Iraq’s subconscious longing for democracy.
I believe that the American people never heard the real reason we went to war in Iraq, and we may never know it.
But taking us to war and developing the reasons as we went, getting thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, all the while torturing people and throwing them into gulags like Guantánamo Bay sound very similar to what we didn’t like about Stalin and the others.
James P. Pehl
Marlborough, Mass., Jan. 11, 2009
Note from KBJ: James P. Pehl hasn't been paying attention. Either that or he has a bad memory. President Bush cited six grounds for the invasion of Iraq in his radio address of 1 March 2003 and in his address to the nation of 19 March 2003. The grounds were (1) enforcing United Nations resolutions; (2) preventing harm to others (such as Iraq's neighbors); (3) self-defense; (4) humanitarianism; (5) punishment of Saddam Hussein; and (6) promotion of democracy. James P. Pehl may think these grounds inadequate, but he has no right to say that no grounds were cited.
