NATION BUILDING 101

Dear Mr. Wolf,
I found today's article in the London Times (11/3/04) very naive. Your conclusion is that Bush must be creative in Iraq? Its nice that you give him the opportunity when last week he and the American people were militant imperialists in your article.

Anyway, this week you're hiding behind Fukuyama for legitimacy suggesting creativity is the answer to Iraq, a problem that you apparently don't vaguely understand. You compare our nation building in Germany and Japan to Vietnam without explaining the huge difference. In Germany we bombed them into submission. On D-day when a crucial little French town called Caen near the Normandy Coast was occupied by the Nazis we leveled the town and killed all who occupied it, including the French. And the French were our allies! In Japan we nuked them twice until they submitted totally

In Vietnam we sought out and killed only enemy soldiers, mostly with small arms fire, and only during battle, but let them hide anywhere they chose the rest of the time. This is a huge difference; an obvious difference. Needless to say left wing antiwar liberals were in charge of Vietnam.

Iraq can be like Germany or Vietnam. Right now Bush is fighting it like Vietnam to minimize enemy causalities, even at the expense of our own, and because he is influenced by the liberals who to a large extent like easy wars, if they are necessary at all. In the end he may have to fight a real war to win. He could start by demanding a total surrender from Fallujah in return for not removing it and its residents from the face of the earth. He might have made the point very sufficiently on a smaller scale last year by killing Al-Sadir and his army when they were defiantly hiding in their Mosque.

Whatever happens, assuming we even elect to stay in Iraq, it will not be creativity that brings peace to the blood thirsty fascists in Iraq. It will be real war or the threat of it, assuming liberals like you are not able to get in the way. comments: bje1000@aol.com