Cowardly Saddam ran away from a fight

This is an open letter to President Bush and the various news media:

Don't spend too much time worrying about whether or not the bombs killed Saddam Hussein. Brutal dictators like him are cowards. No doubt he left Iraq before the shooting started.

James V. Pollock
Kaneohe

Demand balanced news coverage

I just returned from a five-week trip to Asia, where the only English-speaking TV news I could get was CNN (known to haoles there as the Communist News Network).

Many of us look forward to the day when we will get back our free and balanced news media. Since journalism has been mostly taken over by the liberal left, our state and nation have been badly served. We can no longer believe much of what is published in newspapers and magazines, seen on TV and heard on the radio. No more do journalists just print the facts and let the reader make up his or her mind, and give the paper's opinion on the editorial page. Reporters and columnists these days are compared with politicians and used-car salesmen, in terms of public opinion.

I believe that many journalists today can't even remember when mosts newspapers had balanced reporting. Now much of the media and all network TV is a tool for the liberal left, and they are despised by the bulk of the public. Instead of defending America and its Constitution and ideals, the media and their Hollywood handmaidens -- having almost no competition from the conservative right -- engage in aiding the slow destruction of our American culture and country.

The famous saying "When America falls, it will come from within" makes more sense every day.

Don McDiarmid Jr.
Kailua

Networks battled it out over the airwaves

Thank God the war is over! No, not the shooting war, but the other war -- the War of the Competing Networks, where CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC hit the desert running with their own legions of "expert analysts." Even Saddam Hussein got into the act, releasing his own videos to confuse everyone, while his Minister of Misinformation was proclaiming that U.S. troops were committing suicide.

All this in less than two weeks! Who were we to believe?

It was media obfuscation, much like the start of the Spanish-American War, when William Randolph Hearst reportedly said to artist Frederic Remington: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

CNN, which made its rep with honest coverage of the first Gulf War, seemed to slip into an anti-war slant, while MSNBC reported objectively. But it was Fox that supplied the pictures and, maybe, the war.

The ubiquitous Shepard Smith pounded the American Way on Fox (shades of Sam Adams, who, before he became a beer, manufactured the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party), and Bill O'Reilly slammed the "elitist press" for giving too much credence to the anti-war standpoint.

But the hostilities won't really be over until Terry, Howie, Chris and JB arrive to do a little in-studio, postwar breakdown.

Chip Davey

What is that French leader on, anyway?

First, the French were adamantly against the war in Iraq. Now, French President Jacques Chirac is celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

If anyone knows the vintage of wine he's drinking, I'd love to know the label and the year.

John L. Werrill

Saddam has fallen like one of his statues

"While the word (was) in the king's mouth, a voice came from heaven, (saying), 'King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is declared: sovereignty has been removed from you' (Daniel 4:31).

Saddam Hussein's regime has lost control of Baghdad. People from the city have been congregating in the al-Fardus square in front of the Palestine Hotel, where they have toppled a huge statue of Saddam.

Like Nebuchadnezzar, Saddam has fallen. Like Hitler and Stalin before him, Saddam will go down in history as a ruthless tyrant loved by no decent member of the human race.

The Marines put a chain around the neck of the statue and covered its head with a U.S. flag briefly, before replacing it with an Iraqi flag. That flag also was removed before the statue was pulled down. Iraqis then jumped and stomped on the statue, which had been erected last April 28 to celebrate Saddam's birthday, and then pulled its head through the streets, slapping it with their shoes as a sign of ultimate shame and degradation.

What was it that God wanted to teach Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4? That the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind, and bestows it on whomever he wishes (v. 32).

Like all ruthless regimes of the past, Saddam forgot an important historical lesson: At the end of the game, the pawn and the king go back in the same box.

Rich Wilbur

'WMD' becomes part of mythical lexicon

The Vietnam-era phrase "domino effect," we later learned, was leadership paranoia. Similar is the recent "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

Thankfully, this and other delusions of the mythical "coalition" were rejected by Hawaii's House Democrats. They supported the worldwide majority of people who wanted U.N. inspections instead of killing Iraqis. Also, they wanted to prevent our own casualties.

Now the question is, will Iraq be rebuilt? Like Afghanistan?

Jerome Manis