Miscommunication

As I read the letters to the editor concerning the war in Iraq, I am continually amazed at the wide disparity of reality among the people who write them. Clearly, these concerned citizens are either getting their information from very different sources, or they are continuing to trumpet the same rationales originally used for going to war with Iraq without any further reading.

Perhaps it is necessary to review those rationales, because it is clear that most mainstream media sources are not. Regardless, there is a communication breakdown that one could proverbially drive a semi-truck through.

The first rationale for going to war was that Iraq was somehow involved in aiding al Qaeda in their attack of 9/11. This was proven false before the war even started. Numerous sources, including the CIA, declared that al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq before our invasion.

And why would they? Saddam Hussein didn't trust anyone that might threaten his control of power — why would he allow an extremist organization that considered him an infidel to flourish in his country and therefore threaten his control? Even the President, when pressed for a response, declared that there was no proof that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11.

The second rationale was that Saddam was reported to have weapons of mass destruction and that he would give them to al Qaeda to use against us. Again, numerous sources and logic tell us that this rationale does not hold water and was proven false before the invasion.

In fact, the same source that told us that Saddam once had these WMDs also told us that they were destroyed following Desert Storm in 1992. Though the destruction of these WMDs was conveniently omitted from the public during the saber rattling, it was reported nevertheless. Further, why would Saddam give al Qaeda these weapons, even if he had them — so they could turn around and use them against him?

So once again, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. They were not harboring al Qaeda, and they did not have weapons of mass destruction. Since these rationales were proven false, the rationale then became that Saddam was an evil tyrant and we would help democratize his country.

Further, though Hussein was compared with Hitler by the Bush administration, Iraq is in no way comparable to another Nazi Germany. And if we are going to invade every country that we feel should be democratized, then we would be unilaterally invading many countries and thus creating further recruiting tools for al Qaeda. As it is, our invasion of Iraq has created the exact opposite of what the Bush administration declared we had to do, thus making the country the central-recruiting mechanism for our most bitter enemies throughout the globe.

And now Iran seems to be on the agenda in the war on terror. The President, one could argue, is simply restating the common belief of many Americans that we don't respect or recognize any religious or nationalist fervor other than our own. Whereas this attitude may sound macho, it is ethnocentric, egocentric and fatally flawed.

The President's "bring it on" rhetoric is further gist for the fundamentalist al Qaeda mold. The fact is, for every innocent Iraqi killed or injured (and there have been thousands), we exponentially create more enemies. This self-defeating process will never stop unless we either change our policy or, as in the case of Vietnam, we "destroy it (the country) in order to save it."

Historically, this myopic view is what got America in the fix we're in. As the President recently remarked that he is now considering an attack on Iran, one can only hope that Congress and the American people will wake up to this communication breakdown, inform themselves, take control of our country and stop this madness. If we don't, this communication breakdown could break us down.

To repeat another folly like Iraq — and that is a kind way of describing it — would be the definition of insanity by repeating the same action and expecting a different result.