Dear Editor:In response to the letter of Greg Wendt, printed in your publication 3/24/03. If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. I regard your letter as being part of the problem:namely, the lack of vision of the protesters of this war, who seem unable to extract their heads from the sand long enough to look any further ahead than today. What was the purpose of your letter? What would you have us to do? Pull out of Iraq? I pray that you see the impracticality of this. If so, then what was the purpose of your letter, if not to evoke some sort of, “Get us out of Iraq” movement? It certainly was not encouraging of supportive, for any particular group or platform, so far as I could discern. Where was your letter of protest before the war began? Did you only decide to express your opinions after it began in order to hamstring what little unity of purpose exists? I cannot believe this was your goal, so I must assume that you are merely guilty of bad timing. If there ever was a time for solidarity in our nation, this is it. It is arrogant of you to presume that you know what “illusions” some of our troops may or may not be laboring under. Have you asked a significant percentage of them? Have you done a survey? This was simply one of a number of your statements, which appear to be designed to contain only emotive value rather than ideas. You expressed, by virtue of your quotation marks around the word honorable, that you do not feel that the armed forces and, in fact, the mission itself, are honorable. War is not an honorable business, Greg. War is a last resort, a failure of diplomacy. But, the troops who serve us ARE honorable, and I will contend that they are more so than those who lie in the middle of busy streets in order to “protest”. You state that President Bush bypassed the UN to launch an “uninstigated” war. (“Uninstigated”, to my knowledge, is not a word.) If you can broaden your scope of concern, you will see that this moment in time spans many years, not just the last few months. From that perspective, this is action is not “uninstigated”. As to his bypassing the UN, I applaud him for it. He did not, however, do this without first expending significant effort to reach a compromise. I am satisfied with my President’s efforts. His failure to succeed through diplomacy does not dismay me. The failure of diplomacy is going to continue to occur, over and over again, as human history progresses. We can only hope to reduce the frequency of this failure. In the meantime, we are committed to the liberation of Iraq and the removal of a corrupt regime. In my opinion, these are goals that we should have attained some years ago. That we (The USA) worked in collaboration with this regime in the past, a fact that you present as though it negates our authority to proceed, as we (The USA) will in this matter, speaks only to the political, economic, and DIPLOMATIC expediency of doing so at the time. You say that the war is due to the administration’s desire for US “world domination”. This is overstated, at best. Our President’s reasons for this war have been clearly stated. Whether you accept them or not is up to you, of course, but the hyperbole of your statement is not helpful, it is alarmist and incisive. My goal in this letter is to counter the danger that the uncoordinated, emotional nature of yours may mislead some people. Consider, again, what was your letter’s goal? Perhaps more forethought and reflection in the future would prevent you from expressing your thoughts in such an undisciplined, shotgun-like manner. I will join you, Greg, in praying for peace, for a quick end to the war. I pray every day that God will minimize the misery resulting from it, and for the families of those involved.