Sent to the New York Times last week
To the Editor:
Roger Cohen (“Imagined Snipers, Real Challenges“, column, March 27) says “a seven-year dose” of “braggadocio from the White House” is quite enough.
Had they not already been killed by its policies, I suspect hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would agree.
So what was Mr Cohen’s response to the “bungled” war strategy when it was being devised, and might yet have been stopped (to say nothing of the lies that sold it)? A whisper of sotto voce braggadocio.
“To judge by the President’s plans,” he wrote to Times foreign staff on September 11, 2002, “the first half of next year may be busy.”
Without fear or favour indeed.
Daniel Simpson
London, March 27, 2008
The writer was a reporter for the Times in the Balkans during 2002 and 2003
