LETTERS: LIBERALS MAKE MAKE-BELIEVE WAR

To the editor:

I love the way liberals make war, a kind of make-believe war in which nobody -- well, almost nobody -- gets hurt but we win by blowing up empty buildings. Of course, Saddam Hussein says he won. Which liar shall we believe? Hussein or Bill Clinton?

At this point, I'll give Hussein the edge. His aides say they are never, ever going to allow weapons inspectors again, and that's a victory for them, which presumably means Hussein will continue to produce those terrible weapons of mass destruction. Clinton says this includes nuclear weapons, but none of his aides lump nuclear in with the other twin horrors of biological and chemical weapons, so we assume Hussein doesn't have any. This means the aides are more honest than our beloved president, whose job-approval ratings inexplicably keep rising.

The administration sent out a bunch of contradictory signals on this one. In the beginning, various spokesmen said repeatedly the purpose of the attack was to "degrade" Hussein's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction and to keep him from threatening his neighbors. Was there some new threat to some neighbor that I missed? Then they said we had been successful. But when a reporter finally pinned down Secretary of Defense William Cohen, he said, no, we really hadn't hit and weapons factories because we didn't want to release any deadly germs or chemicals into the air.

So what did we hit? Apparently we hit mostly empty Republican Guard barracks and that downtown Baghdad Ministry of Information building, though the military analysts tell us most of the important files, like the elite Republican Guard, had been dispersed elsewhere. Analysts say it was still used as an administrative building. All attacks were at night, of course, when the building was vacant, but maybe we did put a few clerks out of a job for a while.

Still, the commander-in-chief continues to insist we "severely damaged" Iraq's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. By not bombing these particular factories?

Then there were the warnings. TV analysts say we dropped leaflets warning military units to stay put, that we weren't after them, that we were only attacking inanimate objects. The military commander says we didn't warn anybody, but he acknowledges Special Ops did drop 3 million leaflets telling the Iraqis something.

And the Republican Guard had time to move into mosques and hospitals. Well, apparently they left a few guards in the barracks. Hussein says 62 members of his personal fighting force were killed.

So Hussein will have to replace some buildings and repair the telephone cables between northern and southern Iraq. Repairing those cables should set him back a spell. The military says we hit 85 percent of our targets, which apparently did include some missile sites. Are the sites what we feared? Do we really thing Hussein is stupid enough to attack Israel when such an assault would produce truly massive retaliation? Is he a threat to some other Arab nation? He hasn't even been able to modernize his anti-aircraft system, which is so antiquated we didn't bother to attack it this time.

So what was this little play war -- the best kind of war, since it doesn't seem to have endangered any American service personnel -- really all about? Probably nothing more than a Democratic poll the prior weekend that showed public sentiment building for impeachment.

In that sense, Clinton was victorious. The war changed the momentum. Now the Democrats can continue to paint the partisan Republicans as the bad guys. They use the word "partisan" as if it were a synonym for small-minded or mean-spirited -- as if their defense of Clinton wasn't partisan.

And Hussein can continue to build his weapons of mass destruction. And threaten our national interests or his neighbors -- if he ever did.

BILL ZELLMER

Cape Girardeau