U.S.’ Unilateral Plans for Democracy in Iraq

Re “Annan Charms L.A., Chides U.S. for Unilateral Approach on Issues,” Dec. 4: So United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is unhappy because the United States actually carried out the U.N.’s threat against Iraq. Just when Annan and his friends had such a great thing going. They were using the U.S. as a big stick to extort sweetheart oil-for-food deals from Saddam Hussein.

Now President Bush’s friends are getting the sweet oil deals and extorting tax dollars from American citizens to rebuild Iraq. Which, by the way, was not devastated by the war but by the Iraqis themselves.

This is so confusing!

Stu O’Guinn

Huntington Beach

*

Re “U.S. Resistance to Direct Vote Galvanizes Iraq’s Shiite Clerics,” Dec. 3:

We should not be surprised. It’s one thing to sit in Washington, the epitome of democracy, and lay plans to make Iraq the centerpiece of a new political structure throughout the Middle East, but it’s quite a different situation there in Iraq. Aligned against Western modernity are not only the defeated Baathists but also those whose vision of a new Iraq is a mirror image of Iran.

Maybe it’s time to conclude that getting rid of Hussein was a good thing, accelerate formation of a new government and let it go at that.

Larry Kaufman

Los Angeles

*

Re “American Dream, Super-Sized,” Commentary, Dec. 3: If “freedom means what the United States says it means” and American policymakers demand that “others embrace our conception of what it means to be free” whether they want to or not, as Andrew Bacevich writes -- and if the U.S. invades and occupies a country to force this conception on it -- this doesn’t look like freedom to me, but imperialism.

Surely it is pure hypocrisy to say that our primary goal in Iraq is to liberate the Iraqi people. They want direct elections; we have rejected this as likely to put the wrong people in power. How can we promote freedom when we deny them the most basic democratic procedures?

Charles Crittenden

Lake View Terrace