Who do you trust to lead America?

Two letters highly critical of the president appeared in the paper recently. Both seem to believe that we should not even be in Iraq because:

1) Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the United States. I would ask why did the United States go to war with Nazi Germany in 1941? Hitler posed no imminent threat to the United States. He had no technology to directly attack the U.S. in a significant way. We could have continued the European policy of appeasement. Like Saddam Hussein, he had weapons of mass destruction that he used against Poland, Holland and other countries just as Saddam used poison gas, the biological agents on the Kurds, Iranians and his own people. Hitler had a nuclear weapons development program that his scientists lied to him about just as Saddam's nuclear scientist's lied to him on their progress in order to keep their heads. President Clinton and our Congress and the major western nations knew that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and believed he had a nuclear weapons development program. As in 1930-40s, the Europeans chose appeasement.

2) We should have waited for the UN to act and we have squandered the world's good will. We would have waited forever for the UN. We are now learning from captured Iraqi documents and interrogations of Iraqi officials that France; Germany, Russia and others had vital financial interests in keeping Saddam in power. We are also learning that high government officials in these countries and the UN were skimming millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks from the UN's Oil for Food program for themselves.

The fact is that we are in a war of survival. The nations supporting international terrorism despise us with a fanaticism not seen in modern times. The terrorists themselves hate us and poise a continuing threat directly against the United States. President Bush's decisive leadership in waging the war on terrorism has sent a clear message to countries still supporting terrorists. Libya, Syria and others are getting the message.

The question the American voter will answer in November is: Who do you trust to lead us in this war for survival?

MIKE MORGENSTERN

Sandpoint