The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Batting Around

1.13.03 @ 12:01AM

(Page 2 of 3)

While walking my dog, I saw a display on a house near mine. It consisted of two lighted signs. The first read "Peace on Earth." Fine. The second read "No War." Leave it Liberals to politicize Christmas.
-- Ron Finch
Seattle (Baghdad's sister city), WA

DARKER SHADES OF GRAY
Re: George Neumayr's Our Public Scofflaws:

You are right as far as you go, but you missed Davis's monumental cynicism: he promoted Bill Simon's candidacy against Richard Riordan, thinking correctly that Simon would be beatable. Davis even went so far as to say, in effect, "I'm the one who screwed it up (I am nobly taking responsibility) so re-elect me to fix it." Simon's campaign was so awful that the S.F. Chronicle's token conservative Deborah Saunders reluctantly endorsed Davis because he at least had some degree of competence. Not enough people believed that Simon did, allowing Davis, with a 62% unfavorable rating in the polls, to win. (I voted for Simon since I loathe Davis so much, but I did so with great trepidation.)
-- Peter Borregard
El Cerrito, CA

BIG HAND FOR THE LITTLE LADY
Re: The Washington Prowler's Patty Revisits Osama:

Patty, we just love to hear you talk about the wonderful things Osama has done. Keep at it. Never mind what your party and virtually everybody else is saying about how you are committing political suicide.

Sarcastically yours,
-- Jeff Schicke
Wharton, NJ

FROM THE BARRICADES
I am writing about the article "What Big Business Is Really Like" by Lawrence Henry, published by you on 11/5/2002.

In the article, Mr. Henry states:

"At a 'teach-in' on the Cornell University campus, according to an October 24 account on Frontpagemag.com by a graduate student there, Joseph A. Sabia, 'Dr. Chip Gagnon, assistant professor of politics at Ithaca College, charged that the Gulf War was fought so that Dick Cheney's former employer, Halliburton, could get rich off oil deals.'"

Despite this report, I did not say any such thing. What I did say was that following the Gulf War, in the period when Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, that company did $72 million dollars worth of business with Saddam Hussein. Here are my sources:

"A discreet way of doing business with Iraq," by Carola Hoyas, The Financial Times, November 3, 2000.

"Halliburton's Iraq Deals Greater Than Cheney Has Said -- Affiliates Had $72 Million in Contracts," by Colum Lynch, The Washington Post, June 23, 2001.

In no way did I even imply that the Gulf War was fought so that Cheney could do oil deals. I did not address the motivations behind the Gulf War in that talk. The focus of the talk was the dealings that the Reagan and Bush administrations had during the 1980s up to August 1990 with Saddam Hussein's regime, as well as their efforts to prevent the U.S. Congress and the U.N. security council from condemning Saddam for using chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers as well as against Iraqi citizens. These are facts that are very well documented in mainstream media sources.

As you can see from the above-cited sources, it is a fact that Cheney's company sold oil field equipment to Saddam Hussein when he was considered an enemy of the U.S. in the 1990s. My point in mentioning this fact and others was that Cheney and others who now paint Saddam as the epitome of evil are hypocrites; moreover, their previous dealings with Saddam showed extremely bad judgment on their parts.

Unfortunately, Mr. Sabia's report on my talk is extremely distorted and does not reflect what I actually said, what my main points were, nor the sources that I used in preparing the talk I gave at the October teach-in at Cornell.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Mainstream Media, Business, Sports, Religion, Law, Iraq, Iran, Oil