Letters to the Editor

Candidates must debate an end to US unemployment

Regarding your March 6 editorial, "Gloves off for Clinton and Obama?": The Democratic Party nomination process has generated much interest in India. Of the many issues that are being debated between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the problem of growing unemployment is one that I find most disturbing.

With so much automation and mechanization of all kinds of production processes and services in the United States, and there being nothing to suggest that these would ever be reversed, it is difficult to imagine how either candidate can end unemployment.

In fact they have not discussed this issue enough. They have barely touched upon it when debating outsourcing, immigration, and Social Security. This is understandable; politicians across the globe have not found a good answer to this problem.

One wonders: If Sens. Obama and Clinton won't admit the fact that unemployment is a natural product of modern industrial economies and has to be lived with, who else will?

Ashim Kumar Chatterjee
Delhi, India

Al Qaeda was not in Iraq before war

Regarding the Feb. 11 article, "In Iraq, US spotlights Al Qaeda weakness," and the coverage by the "embedded" reporter in weeks prior: From the beginning of the Iraq invasion, the Bush administration has attempted to subvert the truth, portraying Iraq as a battle in the "war on terror."

Early media coverage indicated that Al Qaeda in Iraq did not even exist prior to the United States' invasion. Subsequent coverage demonstrated that Al Qaeda in Iraq had come into existence and was gaining increasing strength. However, in relation to other sectarian elements, such as Moqtada al-Sadr's troops, Al Qaeda is still a very small group working at the fringes of the strife that Iraq has suffered since 2003.

By continuing to hammer the message that we are battling Al Qaeda, President Bush and company try to distract the American people from the fact that we are responsible for igniting conflict in Iraq, a garden-variety sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. We are responsible for one of the most egregious examples of "sectarian" (as opposed to ethnic) cleansing, on a much larger scale than occurred in Kosovo.

Rusty Wyrick
North Little Rock, Ark.

Colleges need to reach all Arabs

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