Your Jan. 28 editorial “A doomed war on democracy” would have been more appropriately titled “A doomed attempt to impose democracy.”
Democracy is, after all, an expression of the will of the majority of the people. By that definition, how are we justified in imposing our will on an occupied people?
Your error is that you, as President Bush did in his inaugural address, assume that democracy–as he defines it–is a divine system. The hypocrisy in his (and your) position is that the Shiites believe just as strongly that a theocratic Islamic state is also imposed by God.
So from what authority do we get the right to impose our system on the occupied Iraqis?
If we ignore our past errors in Iraq and we concentrate only on our recent military intervention, the cost in lives has been staggering (estimated by the British Lancet as 100,000 Iraqi lives lost). It has taken the lives of about 1,400 of our soldiers too.
The Greeks who invented democracy would have argued logically from its definition that military occupiers could not impose democracy on another people.
It is our Iraq policy that is doomed by our arrogance, pride and ignorance.
