It's lovely weather for a dumbass together with you

This one is remarkable. Every time I see Bush's plummeting approval ratings, I always ask myself who these dwindling few supporters are. Well, this is one rather pathetic follower [editor's note--look for how the historical reference he makes supports the exact opposite conclusion from what he draws].

Steve Chapman’s assertion ("Iraq report actually fuels hawks," Commentary, Dec. 14) that the liberation of Iraq from the butchery and tyranny of Saddam Hussein "was a doomed enterprise from the start" and that "we could do worse" than talking to Syria and Iran as the Iraq Surrender, uh, Study Group, shows that it is he, not the Bush administration who have "learned nothing" from history.

He says we should "look at…the Americans in Vietnam." Okay, let’s look. We were never defeated on the battlefield. Tet [Offensive] was a military disaster for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, not an American defeat. And South Vietnam fell two years after we left, not to a popular uprising, but to a conventional armored invasion from the North after the Democratic "Watergate babies" of 1974 cut off the South Vietnamese at the knees.

Now another Democratic Congress, and Steve Chapman, wants to ignore the millions of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote for their leaders and a constitution, proudly displaying their purple fingers. They risk and lose their lives daily, publishing newspapers, joining the police, just going to work.

What do Syria and Iran want? Certainly not stability in Iraq or Lebanon as both have aided the private armies of Muqtada al-Sadr and Hassan Nasrallah, respectively. They want an American defeat in Iraq. Neither want democracy to gain a foothold and spread.

Chapman must have missed the recent revelations of U.S. intelligence officials regarding the ongoing attempts by Syria and Iran to wreak havoc from Beirut to Baghdad. Officials described how Iranian Revolutionary Guards worked in tandem with Syrian military intelligence to facilitate the travel and training of radical Shiite Iraqi militants.

The New York Times reported that "a senior American intelligence official" says that between 1,000 to 2,000 fighters in Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A number of Hezbollah operatives are also said to have entered Iraq to do training on-site.

Chapman’s and the ISG’s naiveté is exceeded perhaps only by the late Sen. William Borah who, upon hearing of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, opined, "Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided."

Daniel John Sobieski

Just one suggestion, Danny Boy---