Let the chips fall

President Bush was talking to us Thursday night about Iraq. I had a little difficulty following what exactly he was saying because it seemed that I'd heard it all before.

What he did, though, was to remind me of what Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1941 State of the Union address to Congress, that "everyone in the world ought to enjoy four freedoms," one of which was freedom from fear.

Well, we sure are getting just the opposite from the current resident of the White House.

In his speech, President Bush enumerated many things to fear. He also used the term "a free Iraq" over and over again. He said that we needed a "free Iraq" as an ally in the Middle East. Iraq will be our ally when pigs fly.

The quickest way for Iraq to gain its freedom is for us to get out of there and let the chips fall where they may.

— Bob Conti, Thousand Oaks

In a word

The answer to the question is "yes."

What is the question?

Did the General Petraus? Yes!

— Mel Lowry, Thousand Oaks

Send dodgers to Iraq

Let's issue helmets and rifles to the liar-in-chief and his fellow draft-dodger, Dick Cheney, and turn them out on the streets of Baghdad for a year.

Let them put their lives on the line in this futile, unnecessary, immoral war rooted in their deceptions and hubris.

Then extend their tours to 15 months.

— Michael Briley, Ojai

Attention diverted

Fixation on the "surge" and its fuzzy prospects in Iraq is diverting Americans' attention from essential issues.

Setting hearings on the 9/11 anniversary prolonged its bogus association with Iraq. The White House's National Security Strategy clearly stated the invasion's objectives: the democratization and stabilization of the world's greatest petroleum reservoir under American hegemony.

Naively, its architects expected its wards to hail the invaders as liberators, to accept electoral democracy and corporate "free trade" as part of the universal coinage of human freedom. Successive fiascos have trimmed the president's rhetoric, but he still doggedly hues to that goal.

Missing is an evaluation of the "global war on terrorism" fought with Iraq as centerpiece. That experience raises irrepressible questions about responding to terrorist attacks with conventional warfare, as Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, repeatedly reminds President Bush. Has the Afghanistan war removed the Osama bin Laden threat? Has the Iraq war undermined his supply of recruits? Are Bush's war tactics isolating Muslim terrorists from their milieu? Have they bolstered allies such as Turkey and Pakistan or Saudi Arabia (both threatened by any regional democratization)? Why do many experts conclude that Bush is losing his global war on terrorism?

Answers to such questions easily lead to the conclusion that current strategy is producing relative decline, not hegemony; international chaos, not stabilization.

In prosecuting the war, the Bush team has exposed itself to impeachment, a remedy Americans are loath to employ with troops in the field. But accumulating negative outcomes are leading to actions likely to ignite wider hostilities. Whether or not that occurs, this administration is leaving behind a volatile legacy that requires thinking far beyond current local events in Ramadi.

Clearly, that thinking is going to have to come from sources outside the Bush administration.

— Allen Dirrim, Oxnard

(The writer is a retired professor of history and political science with Korean War intelligence experience. — Editor)

Misguided war

President Bush and a chorus of supportive voices declare the surge a success and insist the current strategy be maintained. However adamant the voices, the evidence is unconvincing. A foreign occupying power cannot resolve the civil war that the removal of Saddam Hussein unwittingly launched.

The continuing attempt to turn a profound foreign-policy mistake into a military and political success, whether politically expedient, ego-driven, or an honest effort to reverse a failing policy, is sheer folly. Our soldiers should not be fighting neighborhood to neighborhood, breaking down Iraqi doors, patrolling streets, bombing homes.

While the war has gone on and on, the targets and the purpose have repeatedly changed, from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from fighting terrorists to promoting democracy, from defending our nation to nation-building overseas. Some even threaten shifting the target from Iraq to Iran. It's time to say an unequivocal "no" to the perpetrators of this tragically misguided war.

— Bill Hessell, Oak View