The Independent

I took good note of Dick Prosapio's letter in last week's issue of The Independent ("U.S. is involved in a bad marriage").

He is entirely correct-this president and his administration deserve little if any sympathy regarding the Iraq disaster.

And "underdog" has nothing to do with it.

If anyone were the underdog, it would have been Saddam Hussein.

What Dick and others may not understand—although he might, and if he does, so much the better—is that this war was programmed from early on in the administration, and even possibly prior to the administration taking office in January 2O01.

The war was anticipated and planned—up to a point, that is—through meetings of the then Iraq Study Group, not the one that recently published the sane report. That Iraq Study Group was meeting in the White House from early on, and a large basis for their discussions stemmed from papers written by members of the Washington based Neo-Con think tank, Project for the New American Century, including Richard Pearle, Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

The summation of what they had to say was, "We 're the only remaining superpower. If you ever wanted a time to go out and ‘rearrange the furniture’ this is it." Democratization of the world, if necessary by force, commencing with the Middle East, was the agenda.

When 9/11 came, it provided these people, and de facto, the president, with the excuse needed to begin their program.

The excuse, falsely tying Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden, was only the first of many lies perpetrated on the American people, and the world at large.

American citizens and voters must complete their awakening, never allow something like this to happen to our beloved country again.

Bob Liebman, Edgewood