Would Action on Iraq Multiply Terror Risk?

Re “Truth on Iraq Seeps Through,� by Robert Scheer, Commentary, Oct. 8: It is important to keep in mind a little-remembered news item of June 16. As reported by the New York Times, it read: “Classified investigations of the Al Qaeda threat now underway at the FBI and CIA have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States. Instead, the war might have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area.�

If President Bush’s first war to make us safe did no such thing, what can we expect of the second? And of those that will inevitably follow? Time has proved that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) was the only one who got it right the first time.

Offering the president carte blanche is a bad idea.

Silvio Levy

Berkeley

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Scheer’s latest attempt to discredit Bush exposes more truths about Scheer than about Bush. This is one reader who is sick and tired of reading Scheer’s acerbic attacks on Bush. Scheer and all of his anti-Bush pals are opposed to a U.S. “invasion� of Iraq. So am I. I haven’t heard Bush even mention the word.

What I heard Bush request was a resolution from Congress authorizing the use of force to enforce a new U.N. resolution requiring unfettered inspections in Iraq.

What’s wrong with that? Is Scheer afraid that Bush will prove that he is a great leader?

Richard Keck

Monrovia

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In Wednesday’s edition, a letter and floor-debate excerpts from Rep. Tom Lantos and Rep. Dan Burton each state or imply that opposing an invasion of Iraq is equivalent to appeasing Hitler in 1938.

These three men get the lesson of history backward. The failure of Neville Chamberlain and other appeasers was to tolerate the unilateral invasion of one sovereign nation by another, stronger one. Bush is claiming that the Sept. 11 terrorists successfully changed the hard-learned international standard that unilateral attacks on other nations are intolerable. Iraq is just one on the president’s list of “evil� countries. He claims the United States should not be subject to the standards of an international criminal court.

To fail to oppose Bush’s planned invasion of Iraq is to fail to have learned the lesson of what’s wrong with appeasement.

Guy Webster

Pasadena

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One can’t help wondering if Bush’s analysts have figured out whether the risk of a terrorist attack on the U.S. or its citizens will be increased or decreased by going to war with Iraq. It could be that a war with Iraq is at cross purposes and counterproductive with our current war on terrorism. An increase in terrorist recruits and the possibility of a religious-based conflict are more dangerous than any threat of nuclear weapons use.

Howard McGarry

Upland

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This isn’t the USA I learned about in school. This isn’t the USA I want!

John M. Slevin

Los Alamitos