To the editor:

The president has been criticized by former adviser Richard Clarke for giving a higher priority to Iraq than to al-Qaida.

There is an understandable, not ignoble, reason for the president’s preoccupation with the liberation of Iraq: During the first Gulf War, when U.S.-led forces drove Saddam from Kuwait, Iraqis were urged to revolt against him. Thousands of Shiites and Kurds rose in revolt, but then were abandoned when then-President Bush concluded that his mandate was to drive Iraq out of Kuwait but not to overthrow Saddam. The latter’s regime then proceeded to torture and slaughter hundreds of thousands of his opponents, most of them Shiites. (200,000 Shiites in 1991 estimates Gerald Alexander, writing in the Weekly Standard of March 29.)

He also killed 50,000 to 80,000 Kurds that year, plus an unknown number of Marsh Arabs. By British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s estimate, a total of 400,000 Iraqis were killed over the years by Saddam’s regime. And more were being killed all the time.

This abandonment must weigh heavily on the former president’s conscience, as it should on the consciences of all thoughtful Americans. For this reason, I suspect, the younger Bush believed that his country had a special obligation to liberate the Iraqi people. So much for the claim that because no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found, this was an “unnecessary war,” let alone an immoral one.

Carl H. Lande,

Lawrence