Letter: Invading Iraq should not have been Plan A

Monday, Nov. 21, 2005 | 8:31 a.m.

It is hard to understand the thinking behind letters such as those of Elbert Lemmon ("U.S. must continue on," Nov. 16) when the reasons for invading Iraq, an action that has taken the lives of more than 2,000 U.S. troops and countless Iraqis, were ill founded in the first place. Why perpetuate the kind of bad judgment it took us close to 15 years to learn in Vietnam?

Let's say for argument's sake that the Bush administration did not distort the available intelligence reports and really did believe that WMDs were in Iraq. As an alternative to attempting to bully an international community into invading Iraq, the U.S. could have financed the expansion of weapons inspectors and their equipment by 10 times, at a fraction of the cost of the present 3-year-long war, and no loss of lives. The best part of this scenario is that the U.S. would have stood tall -- for peace -- in the international community, and Sadaam would have been seen as a paper tiger.

What is particularly troubling about the ongoing conflagration in Iraq is the belief by many Americans that Sadaam was tied to al-Qaida. Because Sadaam's was a secularist regime, he was hated by Islamic fundamentalists such as Osama bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran with whom Saddam fought a brutal 7-year war -- supported by our government. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There were never any ties.

J.H. Esperian

Las Vegas