How should one deal with the mistakes, nonsense and non sequiturs in Barry Ward's Jan. 7 letter, "U.S. seems unable to learn"? First, I am not a citizen of the United States, as Ward wrongly assumes. Nor did I offer any view, let alone an "adolescent" one, on "Middle East politics," per se, in my Dec. 24 letter, "Caving in to U.S. pressure."
Ward still can't explain why Britain went to war in Iraq, so he cops out with the nonsensical statement that British Prime Minister Tony Blair "forfeits any claim to be acting as a democratically elected leader." That claim arises from Blair's party having prevailed in the most recent British general election -- held after the Iraq war had commenced.
Ward ends by telling us that "Britain was in both world wars years before the U.S." He compares Britain's, the U.S.' and the Soviet Union's World War II casualty counts, then proudly mentions Britain's counterinsurgency in its former colony of Malaya. The irony of bragging about one counterinsurgency while decrying another (in Iraq) seems lost on Ward. He dumbs down war to a matter of who goes in earlier and who does more dying.