To the editor:

As I watched Gen. Petraeus before the joint congressional committee trying to make the case for staying in Iraq, I saw evidence of an administration ignoring history. There he sat, referring to chart after fleeting chart, speaking of “ethno-sectarian violence,” “counterinsurgency operations” and “cyberspace initiatives,” all pulled like plums from a basket of military jargon.

He said, “In planning for the future, we found it useful to look to the past.” He then proceeded to discuss what happened since December 2006, a mere nine months ago.

Perhaps the general should have looked further back to the time when many of us saw Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara making a similar presentation, referring to chart after fleeting chart, speaking a similar jargon so dense and incomprehensible that it drew for a while a veil of pseudoscience over the horrors taking place in Vietnam.

The administration is so focused on a military solution to the mess it created in Iraq that it has only one argument against bringing the troops home now: that it would lead to chaos and killing. Many in Lawrence were making that argument in 2002 about sending the troops in.

Although there is no easy way out of Iraq, it still is not too late to use multinational diplomatic resources to reduce post-occupation violence. But the president continues to ask us to believe there is only one option and it carries a gun.

Paul Fairchild,

Lawrence