Dear Mr Tucker Carlson,
I was stunned that you could not grasp why so many Americans are so intensely offended by President Bush. I do not "hate" Bush but I believe his administration is guilty of serious and dangerous errors. The problem with the Bush administration has been articulated well by many people -- Jimmy Carter said it well at the Democratic convention, for instance.
The Bush administration started out right by attacking Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan but it turned aside to fulfill an agenda already announced before the 2000 election by the people who formed his administration. They started a second war, despite the warnings of our allies. They called it a "preemptive war," and, in order to justify it, they implied that somehow Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attack (their word "link" was deliberately ambiguous and imprecise, surely you will agree).
So we are in two wars. To the one that we should be fighting (in Afghanistan and Pakistan) we have committed, begrudgingly, about 13,000 troops. To the one the Bush people wanted to engage even before 9/11 we have committed 140,000 troops. The financial costs of the Iraq war as you know are astronomical (more than 87 billion dollars and counting), and the human costs (over 900 dead and counting) are tragic. The Iraq war was from the beginning unjustified and inexcusable. And when that war is finally over -- or when our country has given up and withdrawn our troops (which would now be a mistake, of course) -- there will still be Al Qaeda, who have found sanctuary in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and whose funding is coming from Saudi Arabia. Our Congress impeached the previous president for dalliances with an intern. What should be done to this president?
Robert L Canfield.
Note: There are two errors in this note: We have between 15,000-20,000 troops in Afghanistan, and [according to a recent NYTimes] we have spent about 140 $billion in Iraq (and counting).
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