In his letter ("Remember original reasons behind war," July 12) Joseph Martino ignores some facts. First, the world is not static. As new information comes to light, motivations and rationale change. That's the way things work.

Once upon a time, President Franklin Roosevelt was itching to go to war with Germany, a very unpopular thought in America in 1940. So FDR forced the Japanese to act in self-defense in order to keep us out of their way in the Southern Pacific.

We didn't fight because of the Rape of Nanking or the Holocaust; that's just convenient rationale made up afterward. The Axis wasn't a real threat to the United States itself. We went to war because the Japanese bombed us and intended to invade the West Coast.

But the truth was, if FDR hadn't interfered with Tojo in the Pacific, then millions of Americans wouldn't have died in a war that few Americans wanted to fight in the first place.

When we found out that the Japanese couldn't really threaten our shores, we should have quit right then and there, right?

Imagine all of the American lives we could have saved if only FDR hadn't publicly changed his rationale as the war went along.

Secondly, the terrorists were already in Iraq by February 2003. In March and April, the Iraqi people were already welcoming us and asking us in the form of demonstrations, signs and banners, to bring them real democracy. We haven't created any new threat in the last two years.