Letter to the Editor

'Regime change' is Bush term for nation-building

To the editor:

One does not have to be a sympathizer with Saddam Hussein or a believer in his veracity to know that, in Colin Powell's masterly presentation to the United Nations to gain its approval for an invasion of Iraq, his three main points were (1) that Saddam had beaucoup weapons of mass destruction, (2) that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qaida and (3) Saddam was a naughty man.

Columnist David Limbaugh would have us believe that establishment of the truth of any single one of those three points would have been enough to justify the invasion. Point No. 3 was already well-known, but the facts were hardly unique to Saddam or Iraq. I feel the term "regime change" was coined by the current Bush administration and is used instead of "nation-building" to make the nation forget that nation-building was something President Clinton tried to do, albeit somewhat ineptly, in Haiti, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia -- and caught bloody hell for it from his political enemies who now run this country (into the ground, I might add).

I couldn't even stick up a convenience store with the amount of weapons of mass destruction that our forces have found subsequent to the invasion.

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.