To the editor:

Marching for peace probably doesn’t hurt anybody. Might even help because it means exercise, sunshine and fresh air. But these people are utterly clueless as to what is happening.

What’s happening is a race between taking Iraq or losing Washington to a nuclear bomb. There is very good reason to believe Osama bin Laden has such a bomb. But can he use it before we take Iraq? If he does, we lose. If he doesn’t, we win.

We are going to take Iraq, put armies on the border with both Iran and Saudi Arabia and tell Osama we will take them also if he tries anything. Not only take them but any more trouble and we close the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. We put a huge hole in his plan to unify the Mideast in an attack on the world by reintroducing the strategy of mutually assured destruction as deterrence. There is no other way with any hope of keeping suicide terrorists with nuclear weapons from coming to your home town.

A monster has arisen from out of the depths of Islam. We are watching a great world religion self-destruct, unless Osama can be stopped. It doesn’t help that majority moderate Muslim clerics don’t have the courage to admit to the world what Osama really is, a heretic and a cowardly murderer of women and children.

Leonard Magruder,

Lawrence