Letter to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which I'm sure won't be published. Too many other folks have responded to various and sundry naive folks decrying the Iraq war because 'there was no direct tie to Al Qaeda'.

To the Editors: Those who demand evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda are missing the point. Before our armed forces paved the way for a free Iraq, Hussein's government: - Practiced mass execution, torture on a wide scale, and arbitrary arrest and imprisonment - Killed thousands with chemical weapons - Harbored the "most wanted" terrorists from the 80's and 90's: Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas (Nidal led the '85 hijacking of the Achille Lauro) - Provided training camps for terrorists, including a Boeing 707 airliner at Salman Pak used for the training of hijackers - Made cash payments to the families of suicide bombers - Provided official support for PLO, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad; and harbored the Al Qaeda affiliate Ansar al-Islam Thus, Hussein's large-scale human rights violations, support of terrorism world-wide, and development and use of WMD's made him a first-priority target in the war on terror. Those who advocate appeasement, or rely upon conflicted organizations like the U.N. to protect us, need only read their history books. Inarguably, tens of millions of lives would have been spared had Neville Chamberlain forced a direct confrontation with Hitler. Now, with WMD's in the mix, the stakes are even higher. The risks of prosecuting a less aggressive war on terror are too high to calculate. Trying to appease terrorists, or hoping that conflicted international organizations will shield us, is a foolhardy and potentially disastrous approach. Doug Ross