Web Letters: Iraq: The View from Year Six

All this antiwar stuff doesn't make any sense. If we hadn't intervened five and a half years ago, Iraq would still be a threat, and probably would have teamed up with Iran by now. In that case, we would be thoroughly screwed. People talk about how our people have died and Bush is evil for making them go to war. It's not a draft, they volunteered to join the military. They talk about how we have destroyed Iraq and its economy, but they forget something. We are at war. When you go to war, someone has to lose. Maybe they don't lose officially, but they still lose somehow. People, resources, homes, destroyed land, economic problems, they are all ways a country can lose in war. People speak of how there are refugees, and how its not right for them to have to do it. Two things, one: it's war, that stuff happens. Two: look at how the people were living before we came, they were just as bad off under hussein's rule as they are now. Antiwar is senseless.

Zee Heilman

Columbus, OH

I am in total agreement with this. As I watched David Petraeus's captioned interview yesterday on CNN, my thought was "he's crazy." Yes, as crazy as those Beltway insiders, the ones who did not listen in 2005 and will not listen in 200? to the majority opinion of their own citizens (let alone the world's opinion) on the matter of Iraq and the larger question of how the US should act in the world. I'd add this observation to Engelhardt's: an American 7-year-old in 2001, now 14, has lived half their life in a nation at war. They cannot have possibly avoided hearing controversial opinions and twisted rationalizations and seeing pictures of the death and destruction. Like the Iraqi children, they have been formed by this ill-conceived "war of choice" and ill-fated "war on terror." When Tom Engelhardt and I are no longer around to make predictions, the children of the US, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other countries that have lived under the crush of US military power will be running the world. One thing we can't predict is how they will interact. We can only hope and pray that they will be able to forgive, reconcile and find peace. Otherwise, I predict the they will be celebrating the Nth anniversary of...

Tom Hardenbergh

Bath, MI

Our antiwar folks talk about our loses, human and material, what we might have accomplished at home without this war and how the war has hurt America's reputation and economy.

But no one really makes the most important point: we have taken a country that was fairly properous by Middle Eastern standards and rather throughly destroyed its people, its infrastructure, its monuments and its life. There is no way withdrawal will be enough. We shall be morally and politically obligated to help Iraq for decades, despite its oil wealth.

How can Americans live with themselves having destroyed a nation for no reason?

Norman Ravitch

Savannah, GA