Al-Qaida was responsible for Sept. 11. Saddam Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with it. The point of Larsen’s essay was how our government uses the war to justify a multitude of government transgressions against its own citizens. Blaming Sept. 11 for this war ignores the incompetence of this administration — leading us into war unnecessarily and making a total disaster of it once in it.

Everything this administration did reeked of incompetence. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no al-Qaida. The administration relied on bad intelligence, refused to listen to good intelligence, and even punished those who delivered it. It fired generals who were bold enough to tell them what mistakes they were making. It thought we would be welcomed as liberators. The list goes on.

The Republican-controlled, do-nothing Congress showed no interest in oversight, either of the war or the taking away of our civil liberties. Instead, it spent its time in recess or debating flag-burning amendments. Meanwhile, more than 50,000 Iraqi civilians were killed; zero flags were burned.

With all these huge resources going into a failed war in Iraq, we have shortchanged Afghanistan, where the real al-Qaida problem was and where we could have done some good. I’ll never forget Sept. 11. I’ll also never forget the incompetence of this administration in dealing with it.

— Tom Lazarich, Oxnard