{Published in response to an editorial, August 2004. It’s good to know the people who run the paper …}
Dear Am-Pol Eagle:
You recently published an editorial desperately crying for people who were anti-war to stick to their guns (pardon the expression) in spite of the seemingly positive outcome.
But whether it was for the best or not, it surprised me that so much space in your paper was spent on this person’s “facts” that were so obviously wrong.
First, he placed the cost of the war at “a trillion dollars,” which is twelve times the amount of the war bill. Dropping 8000 bombs and “thousands of innocent lives” are questionable numbers, too. Even if they are near the truth, there still was no massive destruction and suffering to the civilian populations as he insists, especially when compared to any other war in history. Compare Baghdad to Warsaw after WWII – it’s like comparing a kick in the shins to being in intensive care. If there could be such a thing, this would be the example of a “humane” war.
Then the writer repeated the regime’s company line about no weapons of mass destruction, in spite of both the today’s American inspectors coming across countless signs of recent production and even raw materials. If you listened to the UN inspection reports before the war, it is a simple thing to conclude that there was only partial compliance and the Iraqi government took countless measures to block investigative efforts. Whether we ever find them or not, we still have the original issue of unaccounted weapons, and we still have no reason to believe they are destroyed instead of buried or sold to the highest bidder.
But the worst insult to the truth is when this man wrote more than once that Saddam Hussein was “playing a fair game to the end.” Are false surrenders, civilian-dressed military, soldiers in hospitals, and weapons in schools “playing a fair game”? Apparently there was at least one person conned by the Iraqi Information Minister.
In other words, the writer must have turned off his television and radio, and stopped reading the paper since well before the war in Iraq started. Publishing editorial opinion is one thing, but giving anyone a forum for such an extremist agenda, listing Hussein’s propaganda as the facts, borders on journalistic irresponsibility.