Re: Yahya Merchant’s April 27 commentary, “Tense relationship result of Iraq war”:

Merchant defines war as “the failure of peaceful negotiations and every resort to the use of international sanctions to resolve a conflict.”

He implies his is the only definition. He asks, “Why continue the failure?”

Carl von Clauswitz, a Prussian army officer and military theorist, proposed the doctrines of total war and war as instruments of governmental policy, therefore making war just as viable as face-to-face diplomacy or mediation.

Saddam Hussein was very concerned about the threat from Iran. Whether or not he actually had weapons of mass destruction is irrelevant now. Iran believed the Iraqi bluff. So did Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the rest of the Gulf states. Indeed, the world bought into it.

It achieved the deterrent effect it was supposed to achieve, until the United States called the bluff.

I do not share Merchant’s sympathy for the Islamic terrorists he calls “ordinary people.” Ordinary people do not fly passenger jets into the World Trade Center, nor do they strap bombs to themselves and detonate them in crowded restaurants.

Merchant wants us to believe terrorists are in Iraq because of our war on terrorism. That is not completely true. The terrorists use funds and trained advisers from Iran, improvised explosive devices from Iran and Syria and rocket launchers and rifles whose origins are Iran.

Never mind the bloodthirsty imams who condone death and violence and call for the conversion or termination of infidels.

Show me an Islamic Gandhi, an Islamic Martin Luther King. Those men did take ordinary people and achieved the extraordinary. Check your IEDs and AK-47s at the door. Islam needs to change its policy of death to a way of peace through nonviolence.

— Tim Robbins, Thousand Oaks