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Dave et. al.<BR>
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You raise many complex issues regarding the Iraq war that would require a long analysis to full flesh out.<BR>
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However, I will make a few quick points to answer what I think are distortions of the facts that you present regarding the Iraq war.<BR>
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"Kurdistan" was a "protectorate," in effect, if not legally, before we invaded. The US was monitoring this situation, sanctions were in place, and air strikes by US war planes over Iraq were common. Saddam's military power was partly destroyed, and marginalized. The Kurds at that time were not under any significant threat from Saddam. Odd how we hear so often of Saddam's brutality toward the Kurds, while the war crimes and atrocities committed by Turkey, a US ally, against the Kurds, the wiping out of entire Kurdish villages with war machinery supplied by the US to Turkey, are almost unknown to most Americans. <BR>
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You state you do not think we were lied to about prewar Iraq. The Bush administration created a climate of fear and anxiety that was used to insist that we must invade quickly or America might face a "mushroom cloud" from a nuclear weapon sourced from Iraq. I won't analyze all the other claims of WMDs made by the Bush administration, all of which have been shown at this date to be false claims. But the evidence was very good BEFORE WE INVADED that Iraq did not have any nuclear weapon capabilities. Hans Blix and Scott Ridder, both experts who worked on the ground in Iraq with weapons inspections, both publicly stated these claims of Iraq having a nuclear weapon were not based on solid evidence. Ambassador Joseph Wilson went to Niger to investigate the claims that Iraq was obtaining "yellow cake" uranium to use for nuclear weapons and found the claim fraudulent.<BR>
Bush repeated this "fact" in a state of the union address after he should have known it was a false claim. Either Bush was incompetent to the point of being not fit for his office, or he lied:<BR>
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<A HREF="http://www.time.com/time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,463779,00.html">http://www.time.com/time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,463779,00.html</A><BR>
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Recall that the argument from the Bush administration was that we could not wait for any other solutions to the Iraq problem because we were under immanent threat of an attack from Iraq. This has been shown quite conclusively to be a false claim.<BR>
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Paul O'Neill, Bush's former Treasury Secretary, reported that there was a push from Bush to invade Iraq 10 days from his inauguration:<BR>
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<A HREF="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml">http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml</A><BR>
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This push appeared to involve a deliberate attempt to manufacture a case for invading Iraq with the foreknowledge that a case for invasion was weak, as the Downing St. memos that have been revealed recently demonstrate:<BR>
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<A HREF="http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0517/dailyUpdate.html">http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0517/dailyUpdate.html</A><BR>
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Regarding the polling data you quote for Iraq opinion on certain issues, I think the violence and chaos of the current situation renders ANY polling data suspect. How many Iraqis feel free to fully express their opinions in the climate they are living in? Even without the war climate that is the current reality in Iraq, a fundamentalist Islamic culture does not encourage the sort of free speaking individualist expression of opinion we take for granted here in the USA. <BR>
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I do not understand your logic behind stating that one source is the best for on the ground reporting from Iraq in your references to Chrenkoff. Isn't it best to get info from as many sources as possible? <BR>
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You might consider reading Aaron Glantz's "How America Lost Iraq" for a different perspective from someone who has been on the ground in Iraq. He makes a case that we should withdraw to prevent a civil war, rather than arguing for the conventional "wisdom" we should stay to prevent a civil war. <BR>
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How the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqis since we invaded, mostly killed by US forces, is a better result than the civil war that might result from our military withdrawal, is a questionable thesis:<BR>
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<A HREF="http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0610-29.htm">http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0610-29.htm</A><BR>
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And consider these reports from US military personnel in Iraq, quoted in the June 13 Spokesman Review newspaper from Spokane, Washington:<BR>
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"A growing number of senior American military officers in Iraq have concluded there is no long term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1700 U. S. troops during the past two years"<BR>
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"I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that ... this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq are not going to be settled, through military options or military operations," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U. S. military spokesman in Iraq said last week in a comment that echoes what other senior officers say.<BR>
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Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraq security troops, said the insurgency doesn't seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.<BR>
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"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I kill one I create three."<BR>
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You do state you think a political solution is the answer. Then are you arguing the US should end the occupation to allow the Iraqi people to find this political solution on their own terms? And if not, how can a truly political solution proceed when it is now being forced upon the Iraq people at the end of a gun barrel? This seems like a catch-22, with no end in sight. We can't withdraw, because civil war will result, though really there is now a civil war going on, with large casualties, tens of thousands of Iraqis dying since we invaded, though most of these deaths are due to US MILITARY ACTION. <BR>
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We have become an invading occupying enemy to many Iraqis, with many joining the resistance due to actions of US forces who have tortured, killed or imprisoned their loves ones. Even high ranking members of the US military are now backing up this assessment. But if we withdraw, what will result? Probably a blood bath between Sunni and Shiite, perhaps with a fundamentalist Islamic State resulting allied with the Shiite's in Iran, just what the US does not want. <BR>
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This is potentially an endless quagmire. It seems we forgot the lessons of Vietnam. What lesson, exactly? That a motivated nationalistic resistance that does not recognize the legitimacy of an invading military cannot be defeated unless the invading force is willing to practically kill everyone involved in the resistance. If we bombed Iraq into the stone age, we might defeat the resistance, but then we would be killing the patient to save them, which is not so far from what we are doing now. We can't bring democracy at the end of a gun barrel to all nations on earth, even if we agree this goal is laudable.<BR>
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The fact the USA would attempt this very doubtful project of democratizing Iraq raises serious questions about our current leadership who pushed for this war with false claims of WMDs from Iraq threatening the USA. It is a testament to the ignorance of the America voter that Bush was awarded a second term given his ill planned and rashly considered push to war.<BR>
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Ted Moffett<BR>
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