Rosa Brooks

Re "Who's a basket case now?" Opinion, Sept. 18 Rosa Brooks has ventured beyond hyperbole and into the realm of utter obtuseness, a place inhabited by angry and ill-informed partisans and whence few, if any, solutions ever come to the challenges facing this country. If this country is headed for Third World status, at least in the realm of erudition and political discourse, Brooks appears to be doing her very best to expedite the process. John Tkacik Washington -- I'd like to add that, out of all the turmoil and hardship caused by this economic meltdown, I hope the one benefit America will derive is the final debunking of Reaganomics.

Re "Up a creek in a Swift boat," Opinion, March 2 As a Vietnam-era vet and antiwar activist, I continue to be appalled by the Swift boaters' hate campaigns. Who is more truly on the side of the troops than we who have served and decry the futility of wars that end in a quagmire? The Swifties, having attacked Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and then Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), must be in search of new soldiers to smear. Who will be next? Vietnam War veteran and anti-Iraq war Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel?

Re "Someone has to manage Iraq," Opinion, April 6 It is doubtful that Congress has the power to manage war to the extent described by Rosa Brooks. Under the Constitution, Congress does not have the authority to tell the president how war is actually prosecuted. Congress has the power to declare war and can use its power of the purse to end a war. If Congress tries to manage the deployment and withdrawal of troops without cutting funds, it will encroach on the president's powers. Congress could end the war tomorrow by cutting off funds for the troops.

Re "Hate the sin, not the sinner," Opinion, Sept. 29 I'm sorry, Rosa Brooks, but I do hate President Bush, precisely because I feel what he has done to this country: lied to lead us into war, disregarded the Geneva Convention, tried to turn us into mutual informants, spied on us, scared us so that we would look the other way as he eviscerated the Constitution -- these things are the measure of the man he is. Bush is an irresponsible oligarch, ill-served...

Re "One flew over the White House," Opinion, Oct. 25 Rosa Brooks implies that the Bush administration and its leaders are the psychotics, but are they any crazier than those she would conciliate with? I think I'll trust our current leadership before I'll trust the leadership of others. Brooks should live abroad and find out how often those other leaders were and are duplicitous. Even at their worst, our leaders are far better.

Re " 'Hero' rings hollow," Opinion, Aug. 3 I have long felt that the term "hero" has become victim of the tendency by politicians to create jingoistic phrases that play well with the public. I was a reserve police officer for 20 years and never felt that just showing up for a work shift was a heroic act. It was simply what I chose to do to as a contribution to the community. The term has become devalued in my view. If everyone is a hero, then no one is.

I am glad to see that Rosa Brooks is publicizing the most egregious of the Katrina scandals: the large number of poor people who live in our midst (Opinion, Sept. 7). Brooks uses the disaster to assail the right, but I have a different take. Once the champion of the less fortunate, the Democratic Party, to which I have belonged for 35 years, has abandoned the poor in preference to abortion rights, gay marriage, political correctness and the placation of major contributors. Brooks should have pointed the finger at all levels of government, both political parties, special interests, black leadership and every one of us for not doing enough about this problem.

Re "Bush urges Cuba to reform," Oct. 25 As the Bush administration issues invectives against Cuba and Iran, the world hears only hypocrisy. Both regimes came into being as the result of America's foreign policy. In 1959, Cuban revolutionaries overthrew a corrupt military dictatorship backed by the United States as a supplier of cheap products for the American consumer market. In 1979, Iranian revolutionaries delivered a similar fate to the shah, who was backed by the U.S.

The use of unmanned aircraft to kill suspected terrorists, a practice that has dramatically escalated during the Obama administration, is receiving fresh and welcome scrutiny in Congress and elsewhere even as the number of drone strikes seems to be on the decline. Last week, Rep. William M. "Mac" Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of a House armed services subcommittee, introduced legislation to require the Pentagon to promptly inform Congress about every drone strike outside Afghanistan as well as about operations to kill or capture terrorists away from declared war zones.