To the editor:
As the War in Iraq deteriorates on a daily basis and the White House keeps getting embroiled in scandal after scandal, I think it is high time to speak out about the woeful, disgraceful and dangerous administration of George W. Bush, potentially the most inept president to serve as this nation’s chief executive.
The younger Bush has made monumental mistakes that give a scary insight into his character and priorities. The two glaring ones are his taking this country to war against a nation that posed no threat to the United States and his deplorable reaction to the devastation wreaked on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.
Granted that Saddam Hussein was a cruel tyrant who executed many of his own people, but this former ally of ours in Iraq’s fight with Iran in the 1970s and early ‘80s had absolutely nothing to do with the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. Contrary to the claims of the Bush administration, Saddam was not aligned with Osama bin Laden; the two could not stand each other. Also, there were no weapons of mass destruction, as the Bush government claimed; that had already been determined by the best U.N. inspectors and confirmed later by our own weapons detection specialists.
As two-thirds of the American people now realize, we have been had by Bush II, who sought to go his dad one better in Iraq. However, unlike President George H.W. Bush, who set up and led a real coalition of several nations, including several Arab countries, in the successful Persian Gulf War that pushed Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait, the younger Bush chose to go it practically alone without much forethought concerning the occupation of a volatile nation and an exit theory. Now our brave soldiers are caught in a vicious civil war whose violence has even reached the Iraq Parliament itself.
Furthermore, to add insult to injury, the tours of duty of our already weary and imperiled servicemen have been lengthened by three months. The U.S. Army, Marine Corps and National Guard have been seriously overextended and weakened by their own commander-in-chief, whose budget cruelly cuts allocations for the thousands of wounded veterans from this ill-wrought and badly managed war.
While the Iraq War continues to highlight Bush’s abominable lack of an effective foreign policy, his response to Katrina spotlights his inadequacy on the domestic front. The president was very slow to fathom the devastation of the hurricane on New Orleans and inexcusable in his failure to authorize a realistic emergency plan to rebuild one of our most beautiful, unique and historic cities. Almost three years after the devastation, much of New Orleans remains destroyed, and much of its population still lives in exile. The thousands of emergency mobile homes parked outside of the afflicted city but never used stand as an indictment of a president whose ineptitude is equally evident inside and outside of our borders.
No wonder that the electorate revolted last fall against President Bush and his party and elected enough Democrats to take over the Congress and put the brakes on an administration that is not only reckless but dangerous as well.
Ross Paradis
Frenchville
