Letters to the Editor

Rewriting the history of Iraq war

Trudy Rubin's column "A bipartisan effort doomed misadventure in Iraq" (Sunday) is an astonishing rewrite of history. Iraq represents the failure of the Republican right ideology. It was one of the greatest misjudgments in American history - all those lives lost, our economy wrecked, without even a valid reason for attack. Her argument that President Obama is at fault because he didn't stabilize Iraq and neutralize Iran's influence is purely fanciful. How could that be done without a continuing and substantial U.S. military presence? Is it our responsibility to fix everything and everyone forever, while our own economy collapses from imperial overreach? It is up to Iraq to fix its problems. Obama's arguable mistake is that he didn't remove the troops faster, and right a wrong that should never have occurred.

Mark Squires, Philadelphia

A waste of lives and money

Tony Auth's cartoon of Iraq in 2011 (Sunday) is premature. Give it six months to a year and we will be using helicopters to take our employees from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. This will be a repeat of the helicopter rescue in Saigon. It's only a matter of time. What a waste of lives and money!

Tom O'Shea, Gloucester City

Sentence war leaders to service in Iraq

I believe that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others who invented the Iraq war should be sent to Iraq for the remainder of their lives, housed in a shack, and made to work every day to rebuild the country and its families. In addition, they should take 90 percent of their money and turn it over to Iraqi families. It will not bring back the 100,000 Iraqis or more than 4,000 Americans who were killed, but it is a tiny payback.

Ann Eynon, Villanova

A disengaged president

If Iraq should devolve into sectarian violence and become little more than a satellite of Iran, there will be no one other than President Obama to blame. From March until October of this year, at a time when we had tens of thousands of military and civilian personnel on the ground, our president failed to reach out to Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. When a president is so disengaged from affairs of state, is it any wonder that a new status of forces agreement was not negotiated?