As you watch your evening news and see the caskets coming back from Iraq, remember who is responsible.

Saddam Hussein was coddled and aided by the Reagan and the first Bush administrations until he broke from his leash and invaded Kuwait.

The father wasted a golden opportunity in 1991 to remove Saddam from power and occupy Iraq with a truly international coalition.

The Iraqi people would have been much more receptive to us in 1991 than they were after 12 years of economic sanctions, massacres of Kurds and Shiites plus the second Gulf War.

Bush has surrounded himself with advisers who have been advocating war in Iraq since 1997. Look at the group called “The Project for the New American Century” at their Web site www.newamericancentury.org.

The group vociferously advocated war with Iraq and rebuilding the U.S. military so we can dominate the world in the 21st century.

I am not making this up; go to their Web site and read their positions.

Given that war was inevitable, the Defense Department began generating scenarios concerning Iraqi occupation early in 2002.

The Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, strongly advocated for an occupation force of 400,000 troops because he had studied the problem for years and knew the difficulty of a successful occupation. On the other hand, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was thinking of using 75,000 troops.

Shinseki was forced to resign after being publicly humiliated by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

It became clear after the fall of Baghdad that the military had neither the orders nor the manpower to even stop the people of Iraqi from looting their own country.

The State Department spent millions of dollars working with Middle East experts to produce several thousand pages documenting the potential pitfalls of the occupation and how they could be avoided.

The arrogant Bush appointees in the defense department ignored all of this information that might have helped to prevent the chaos and death we are watching now.

Look at the excellent article, “Blind Into Baghdad,” written by James Fallows at the Atlantic Monthly at www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/media-preview/fallows.htm.

Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney all publicly stated that the troops would be met as liberators, not an occupying force.

They severely underestimated the number of troops necessary to win the peace and may have doomed it from the very start. These people should resign for their truly horribly incompetent running of this war and offer repentance to the parents of all the Americans, Iraqis and others who have died in this tragedy.

Ted Peterson

Ames