Letter Of The Day

has to be mine, of course, but there's another one included, because it ran right below mine, and was about the same subject matter (get that feather in your cap, and i'll see you in heaven)

since the words of the first are mine, i will not italicize them.

I'm wondering, would the Globe have endorsed George Bush Jr. had they known the following:

1. That Mr. Bush knew Saddam Hussein was no threat to our country months prior to invading;

2. That Mr. Bush decided to use force to overthrow him regardless; and

3. That Mr. Bush was "fixing" the intelligence to sell the impending invasion to the American public.

Now that we know the truth with the release of the Downing Street Memo, and we continue to lose dozens of soldiers a week in the same war Mr. Bush announced as being mission accomplished over two years ago, is there any doubt to the testament that Mr. Bush suckered half the American population and obviously one small town newspaper?

and now for the second letter:

Truth became war casualty

By HAROLD W. HOPP, Mason City

The Downing Street Memo informed the American public that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had promised President Bush in April 2002 he would join the United States in a war against Iraq.

British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove reported that Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action and the intelligence and facts were being "fixed" around that policy. This was nearly a year before the pre-emptive strike was made on March 19, 2003, against Iraq.

The reader might be interested in comments made by Mickey Herskowitz after conversations he had with George W. Bush in 1999, when he was hired to write an autobiography of Bush during his campaign for the presidency.

Herskowitz said Bush was thinking about invading Iraq already at that time. He told Herskowitz: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it."

The horrible events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the resultant support for Americans engendered by them at that time provided an opportunity for the president to be seen as the "great leader and commander in chief."

So to gain support from American people who were not convinced that war was necessary, it became the hallmark of the president's administration to appeal to our fear and our gullibility by lying to us about Hussein's ties to al-Qaida and his weapons of mass destruction. Truth became a casualty of this war, along with the 1,914 American dead and the 12,896 more wounded thus far. What a terrible price to pay for the Napoleonic complex of one man.

-source