Response to Bresnan
By SEAN HANNON

October 23, 2003

Dear Ms. Bresnan,

As I understood the point of your letter of Oct 20th, it was that we should never forget 9/11 (I agree), that it could happen again (without question!), and therefore we should support our president’s war on terrorism in Iraq (um, we need to talk...). Your secondary points were that I was pushing a leftwing agenda in which I “continually write letter after letter with misleading information”, and that you “wonder” at my motive in doing so.

First, I have made no secret of my liberal anti-war bias. I am a civil rights activist and stand firmly in defense of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This does not preclude my ability to engage in respectful and intelligent discussions with Republicans. Nor does it preclude me from being able to support my essays with facts.

Which brings me to your allegation that I habitually use misleading information.  Apart from the one example you cited regarding Vietnam (which I will get to later), what were you referring to? Do you mean my letter of September 15, in which I point out that Attorney General Ashcroft was criticized by the Justice Dept’s Inspector General for his abusive use of the USA Patriot Act? When I accused Mr. Ashcroft of making “grossly misleading statements” on the Larry King Show, I was careful to back up my assertions with transcripts of their conversation that directly conflicted with the report of the IG.

Or were you perhaps thinking of my letter of September 22, when I quoted President Bush as saying “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th”? I have to think that you regard this as a piece of  “misleading information”, since you apparently still think Iraq had some connection to 9/11. And yet, it is a fact that he said it. And isn’t it telling that you and many other Americans cannot bring themselves to snap the link. Even the president’s own admission cannot dislodge it, so ingrained is the deception that he and his administration nurtured.

And this is why I write, to add my voice to a growing chorus of responsible adults on both sides of the political spectrum who aver that our government’s response to 9/11 was terribly off the mark in diverting our attention away from Osama Bin Laden and his network of criminals. There is hardly any dispute that we have allowed Al Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup while we adventured into Iraq on false pretenses.  Saddam Hussein IS a murderous tyrant who unquestionably needed to be dealt with. We just disagree completely on how we should have assisted the Iraqi people in getting him out.

Finally, I want to address your one example of “misleading information”,  my mention of Vietnam in the context of the Iraq war. Well, I must tell you, I am not alone in making such comparisons. In a harsh criticism of our Iraq policy, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) said just this week, "The one great mistake that America made in those 58 years [since World War II] . . . was we tried to do something alone. That was Vietnam."  Retired General Anthony Zinni said of the Iraq situation: "My contemporaries and sensitivities were forged on the battle fields of Vietnam where we saw the garbage and the lies and we saw the sacrifice. And I ask you, is it happening again?” And Democratic Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) exclaimed “We have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam.” These are comparisons being made by people with far better credentials on the subject than me. You can search for the full texts of these comments on www.truthout.org., a leftwing website that hosts many mainstream news items and un-embedded reportage from Reuters, Associated Press, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Le Monde, Independent UK, the Floor of the US Senate, and other sources. (You were curious where I was getting much of my information.)

By the way, I agree with you that to compare Iraq and Vietnam solely on the issue that you raised - that of the length of elapsed time - would be misleading. However, I never once compared them on that basis. I was sharing a snapshot of the past that bore a striking similarity to the present in terms of the war’s direction, regardless of how long it took to get that way. To deny any comparison just because one aspect doesn’t fit is silly. And to suggest that I was trying to equate the obviously disparate lengths of eight months time in Iraq to the long years of Vietnam was just a bit misleading.