Letter: Saddam just another former American stooge

Friday, Jan. 31, 2003 | 4:29 a.m.

What is particularly galling about George W. Bush as cheerleader in chief, beating the drums of war, is that Saddam is actually no worse than any of the other morally challenged individuals we have supported and supplied in recent years through our foreign policy.

Consider for example the brutal dictators who profited from America's political largesse: Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, to name a few.

The most painful irony regarding Iraq, however, and one that our president keeps referring to, is that Saddam gassed his own people; it was we in the West, particularly the United States, who supplied the material and stood by because, at the time, it was seen as a better alternative for the region than the religious fundamentalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran with whom Iraq fought a seven-year war.

Saddam is nothing more than a brutal, previously supported U.S. stooge who stopped cooperating with the U.S., and now he has got to go, according to President Bush, at the cost of who knows how many civilian and military lives.

JOHN ESPERIAN