To the editor:

I watched Dan Rather’s interview with Saddam Hussein (CBS, Feb. 26). The interview was the first time I had ever heard from Saddam directly and I wondered why one hour was all he had for all that Iraq has been the great American football.

Adding to that the reports from American journalists that the Iraqi army is, at best, a ragtag outfit of Beetle Baileys who surrendered without as much as a sneeze to American troops in the first Gulf War is not a picture to me of a lethal army that’s going to do anyone any real harm. Saddam is not known to pump his country’s wealth into his military and his military is not known to win wars.

Going further, Saddam Hussein came to power the same way every ruling party before him came into power, which is by using force. In Iraq, formerly known as Mesopotamia, the people have known war since 330 B.C. when it was first conquered. From then, every ruling party came about by overthrowing the party before it. It is not as if the conflicts associated with Saddam Hussein are exclusively his.

Bear in mind that his politics, the Ba’ath Party, always stood for rejecting and opposing imperialism for the sake of the Arab world. It is this American and British bullying encroachment upon the Arab world that has inflamed it against us.

In closing, the Koran is law in the Islamic faith, not Saddam Hussein. It is the extremes by which the Koran is adhered to and some are more extreme, or fundamental, than others.

So what after all? Did Saddam put Tim McVeigh up to the terror that befell the Murrah building, too? Because we’re free and we believe in things?

Sandra McCarren,

Lawrence