To the editor:

In her Feb. 10. letter, “Drunk on war,” Ms. McCarren demonstrated, however unwittingly, what a great country we live in. Here, we are free to criticize and disagree with our government and its leaders (imagine trying that in Iraq). We are even free, as Ms. McCarren showed us, to engage in meretricious self-flagellation over a delusional contrition at living in the greatest country on earth.

Freedom, however, becomes license when one seeks, in a self-indulgent tantrum, to project one’s own peccancy on a whole people by stating, as Ms. McCarren did, that “we” deserve what happened on 9-11. Such a position is not only fatuous, it is an unpardonable insult to the thousands of our citizens who died that day, the thousands more who mourn them and the many heroes who gave their time, energy and even lives in the aftermath.

Jerry Pope,

Lawrence