Protests call for half-baked war

Now that the war in Iraq is largely finished, I wonder if peace demonstrators will still call for an immediate military pull-out from that country. The fact is that once the coalition troops first marched into Iraq there could be no retreat, and anyone who was truly for peace realized that fact immediately. Those who so loftily extolled “peace” over war had simply not thought it through. Peace would certainly not have been the outcome if the troops had been pulled out.

I found the Guest comment by Roger Graham ["Hidden dangers of war in Iraq,” April 3] to be simplistic, self-righteous and filled with the usual vague truisms found in so many “anti-war” diatribes. It was easy for Roger to be dismissive of “the crying by downtown merchants” about the hurt their businesses had suffered because of the self-indulgent actions of the peace demonstrators, when his own business is in cyberspace (eBay), where demonstrators can’t affect his income. Roger, how was hurting these good Chico small-business people going to help anything, and who gave you or the others the right to cause innocent people this distress?

It would not have been peaceful to leave Iraq before the task of removing Saddam’s regime was finished. In fact it would have brought terrible consequences. The Saddam regime would have readily regained control, and it would have responded the way it always had, but with an even more brutal and repressive force.

Do you doubt that Saddam would have mandated mass executions and the torture of thousands of citizens and soldiers? Wouldn’t even more Iraqis have starved as Saddam funneled resources to rebuilding his military and his palaces at the expense of feeding the people? And if he didn’t already have designs on destroying the United States with terrorist connections, wouldn’t he have then initiated a revenge attack? So please don’t claim to be for peace if you had insisted on the United States pulling out of Iraq. Clearly you would rather just be anti-United States than for peace.

Many anti-Bush people believe that the whole operation was “blood for oil.” This theory would make Bush and his administration the worst conspiracy of evil that our country has ever seen. It reminds me of the senseless Republican bashing of Bill Clinton. Bush took a big chance, but I believe that he did it in good faith, not to permanently take over the oil production. Bush is already rich, but if he wanted more personal wealth he could certainly accumulate it in much easier and quieter ways.

Until it’s proved otherwise it’s apparent that President Bush entered Iraq for the simple reasons he’s stated, which is to take out a murderous, torturing regime that has never honored the peace treaty signed 12 years ago, a task that the rest of the United Nations simply would not enforce, to find and destroy the weapons and to free the oppressed people of Iraq.

If you want to find a political stance motivated by profit and the desire for power in the world, just examine the motivations of France and Russia. They will lose billions with the Saddam regime eliminated, and they hate the power and strength of the United States.