Bush will be long gone before Iraq mess is cleared

Bush will be long gonebefore Iraq mess is cleared
EDITOR:
I'd like to clear up a few of the propaganda points and exaggerations in your lead editorial of Sept. 5, "U.S. Gives Old Allies A Chance To Reunite In Rebuilding Iraq."
First, the title says we're giving them a chance. Please, Mr. Editor, we need them a lot more than they need us. Money, lives and Bush's political future are the reasons we're begging at their door, not they at ours.
Second, in paragraph three, somebody in your office wrote that the U.S. had been forced to go it alone in deposing Saddam Hussein. That remark is real baloney. Read your own newspaper. Bush had his plan early, and the timing was all important. He did not want to fight in the 125-degree heat of the Iraq summer, and he wanted it all over before the Democrat primary season begins in January 2004. These among other reasons led Bush to stop the U.N. inspection before they had been allowed to go another three to six months, exhausting their search. It is quite likely that Bush would not have been able to go to war had the inspectors been given all the time they wanted (needed). His main justification for the war, (weapons of mass destruction), would no longer have been a viable issue. Your use of the word forced in your editorial is totally unjustified.
Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, no liberal, wrote months ago that Saddam had destroyed his WMD but kept the destruction secret because the weapons gave him his best threat over his own people and his neighbors in the region. The wackiest point is the argument to support Bush's war in Iraq that Saddam was a brutal dictator. For a very long part of my life, our government has supported one brutal dictator after another.
In Latin America for instance we supported the most brutal regimes imaginable because they were anti-Communist, and we attacked liberal regimes because they were not sufficiently anti-Communist.
Then the point that there will only be more strained relations if the United States, France and Germany don't get patched up pronto is true. There won't be any real improvement in our relations with these two nations until there is a regime change in the United States. We may get them to go into Iraq under the U.N. or even NATO, but it's Bush's ego that started the whole mess along with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who have authored the pre-emptive action foreign policy under which we now live.
The situation reminds me of the pique between England's, Russia's and Germany's leaders and royalty before WWI. Their personal fights and ego trips caused thousands upon thousands to die on the battlefields of Europe. Bush had this same attitude toward Germany a year ago after he thought he was insulted by the German chancellor.
Last, you write about concessions by the United States. Bush's political future may be on the line if he can't get the Iraq situation under control; hence the "concessions" of asking or begging them to lend a hand. I hope that German and France go in and that we can get many other nations to go in also because it will help us out of a bloody, expensive fiasco of our own making, but don't expect a dozen or even two dozen new participants to assuage the hatred among the Shiites, Sunis, Kurds, terrorists and others who will be there bombing away long after Bush has gone back to Texas. What a sorry, sorry mess we have created.
MYRON GARWIG
Youngstown
Quick fix from street crew
EDITOR:
The Youngstown street department has done it again. I called Monday to report a hole that had appeared in front of the library on Fifth Avenue. Knowing that there must be considerable extra work generated by the recent street flooding, I was amazed and delighted to see the patch, along with other work on Fifth and adjacent intersections, had been beautifully completed before noon Wednesday. What a crew!
Every spring we are faced with potholes galore and we are always certain to complain about the situation. This year, something made me notice that well-done patches were put in place quickly on the major roads I travel
DEBORAH MATTHEWS
Youngstown