Of talk show hosts and great Americans

To the editor: You know you are listening to propaganda when a talk show host refers to a reasoned, orderly withdrawal from Iraq as “cut-and-run.” By that logic, President Reagan cut-and-run when he took our troops out of Lebanon after they were bombed by terrorists; Nixon cut-and-run from Vietnam; George Washington won the Revolution with a comprehensive strategy of cut-and-run; and the heroic retreat from Dunkirk was just another instance of cowardly cut-and-run. But I did hear a moment of truth enter into one a propaganda radio show. A self-identified Marine vet of the first Gulf War said that winning a war is a matter of destroying the enemy’s will to resist. That, in a nutshell, is the valid issue that we are debating: Whether we can, in fact, destroy the enemy’s will to resist. If not, then what realistic goals can we set for ourselves? Right now we are losing a battalion a month to death and injury. Is this acceptable, considering our goals? If we believe that we will never break the will of the enemy, then does it really make sense to keep 160,000 of our troops in Iraq forever? The biggest propagandists, who incidentally never served themselves, strive to stifle debate, and each loves to be called “a great American.” But propagandists cannot be great Americans. Believers in torture cannot be great Americans. That title goes to people who humbly seek the truth and who promote human rights, not torture. Martin Luther King was a great American, not these ersatz tough-guy talk show hosts. K.J. Walters Monroe