Today, the President has conveniently

given us an enemy we can sink our teeth into, not the secretive one that

has gone into hiding. He is attempting to draw links between the two to

justify our pulverizing the one we can see.

When I attended the Air Force

Accident Investigation school, the instructor suggested that as a starting

point on arrival at a crash site, we look for something missing or something

extra. What seems to be missing in our President's argument is any change

in Iraq's status.

We know Saddam is a very bad

man who already possesses biological and chemical weapons with the means

to deploy and deliver them to the battlefield. We've known it since his

war with Iran (when we were giving him material support). We also know

he has been trying to develop nukes.

What President Bush hasn't

shown us is any compelling reason we need to take the drastic step of

going to war with him, perhaps prompting him to use the weapons he has

on the invading force or on Israel.

Rightly fearing a world backlash,

Mr. Bush has couched part of the argument in terms of U.N. Security Council

resolutions, a strange argument from a man who has spent his entire tenure

in office ignoring the rest of the world.

The one thing he and I agree

on is the theory that we don't need anybody's permission to strike at

any country that constitutes a palpable threat to the United States.

So where is the evidence linking

Hussein to al Quaeda? Where is the evidence that Saddam would risk complete

destruction by using such a weapon on the United States? Why worry about

the crude weapons he can bring to bear when thousands of very sophisticated

ones exist under degraded controls in Russia? Why does he cozy up to the

bloated kleptocratic leaders of the country that spawned 15 of the hijackers

that did attack us, and wish to wage war on a people who have not?

It seems our foreign policy

now will boil down to an Andy Capp-ish, "I thought he was going to

hit me so I hit him back first" philosophy (at least to the midterm

elections). This line of reasoning will keep us very busy indeed, and

certainly keep the world wondering what we're going to do next.

Would our president use Saddam

Hussein in a cynical ploy to increase his and his party's popularity?

Look at his past and you'll find ample evidence for cynicism.

If he has evidence linking

Saddam to al Quaeda, or evidence that Saddam intends to attack us or our

interests (outside of the no-fly zone), Mr. Bush should lay it before

the people. This artificial brinksmanship may work until the house-to-house

fighting in Baghdad, or gas attack on Israel with her subsequent nuclear

response.

But when it's all over, I fear

most of us will be saying, Why did Bush start this, and now that we've

inflamed the Muslim world, are we any safer?

Timothy J. Parker

Peachtree City

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