Invasion has been a blunder

RE: Margot Holman – Reason to stay the course

Our foreign policy in the Middle East over the last 50 years has brought nothing but hatred and mistrust of America. Our invasion and occupation of Iraq on false pretenses, while claiming to bring democracy to an oppressed people, has been fuel for radical Muslim fundamentalists.

We will support any brutal dictator, so long as it is in our commercial interests – as we supported Saddam, the Shah of Iran and the royal family in Saudi Arabia. Our interests are not democracy, but oil.

RE: Archie McPhee – We should use our military might or get out

McPhee argues that we should use full military force in Iraq or get out, and if we were not prepared to use full military force, we should not have gone in. I can only agree with the last phrase.

The idea that we should kill as many civilians as it takes to kill all the insurgents and terrorists is immoral. This idea reminds me of the Vietnam-era statement that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

RE: Glen Holzhausen – Let’s be rational

I keep harping on why we invaded Iraq, because if we don’t acknowledge the incredible blunder it was, we’re likely to do it again; for instance, in Iran.

The lesson of Vietnam should be that we had no business there in the first place. It was a nationalist issue – the people of Vietnam vs. France. Once the French left, we backed an extremely corrupt Christian government in a predominately Buddhist country.

The thousands who fled or died when that government collapsed were a fraction of the millions who died as a result of our war, just as the thousands who might die when we leave Iraq will be a fraction of those we’ve already killed.

As for General Petraeus – he’s been put in an awful position: the spokesman for a flawed and failed policy. I wish he would speak up, as dozens of generals now have, in denouncing the war and the policies before many more American lives are lost.

Jon Monday