Re: "Good morning, welcome to my empire," Feb. 11 column.

Eliot Walker legitimately criticized George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's personal oil investments as they pertain to war in Iraq. However, the rest of Walker's column lacked substance and ignored history.

Walker claimed that "Iraq is not yet capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction." In 1991, Iraq delivered 39 Scud missiles with conventional warheads into Israel, and Saddam Hussein has chemically gassed Iranians and Iraqis since 1980.

Today, a biological warhead into Israel's water system would quickly kill 100,000 people -- proportionately equivalent to 4,600,000 Americans.

Walker complained that "America invades Iraq ... because we can." No, America invades Iraq because the U.N. tolerates Iraq's consistent violations of surrender agreements it signed in 1991. Germany and Japan would have been invaded had they violated surrender agreements signed in 1945.

Walker criticized Bush for claiming that "our course need not depend on the decisions of others." Had the United States depended on E.U. decisions, millions of Bosnians would still be raped and murdered by Serbian forces. France, Germany, and other "enlightened" European states consciously decided to let a dictator in Europe destroy millions at will until the United States stepped in.

Finally, why should we respect the U.N. when it was that organization's head of global peacekeeping operations, Kofi Annan, who ordered all U.N. personnel to immediately leave Rwanda on April 6, 1994, the day Hutu extremists began murdering Tutsis throughout Rwanda.

U.N. forces followed Annan's order and 800,000 Tutsis were massacred. Annan has never apologized for his role in the genocide.