Letters to the Editor
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And all this for weapons of mass destruction that never existed.
Chaumont, you're quite right of course that in wartime men who would be perfectly decent and law-abiding people in civilian life do unspeakable things, partly out of fear, partly for "payback," partly from a sense of entitlement (the rapes of French women that you describe, for example; I imagine the thinking went, "we liberated them, they should be grateful, they owe us.") But in World War II, at least there was a legitimate casus belli. If we weigh the cost-benefit ratio of American involvement in the war, with all of the deaths, war crimes and moral degradation that it involved for our men, it was still worth it to help defeat Hitler. In Iraq, there is no legitimate casus belli, it's a war of unprovoked aggression, and the men who set the horror in motion should answer for it at the Hague.