A Sad Reflection on the U.S.

Byron York’s column entitled “20 Years After the Iraq Invasion” (March 23) was, to me, a sad reflection on the United States of America as a country and as a culture, not in its entirety, but sufficient to cause unnecessary harm both here and abroad.

York quoted one Max Boot, a Russian-born American writer and military historian, who confessed how wrong he was in supporting the invasion of Iraq, but listen to the words he used: “In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospect of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking.” In his apparently maniacal zeal to export “democracy by force,” Mr. Boot also overlooked the sheer “impossibility” of such an endeavor, as in, when has such a thing ever been accomplished? Please, show me the country where the U.S. has replaced a corrupt dictatorship with a functioning democracy instead of leaving the country in a destabilized mess, which is something we are very good at doing.

York’s column winds down by revealing the true nature of these folks, these “zealots of democracy.” Instead of learning from their mistakes and correcting their ways — by allowing other countries to figure things out for themselves — according to York, “Now they are supporting Biden and advocating greater U.S. military aid to Ukraine ... Indeed, some of the very same people who promoted the Iraq War and attacked the war’s critics are promoting U.S. aid to Ukraine and attacking critics of that aid.”

OK, what really is wrong with us? Do we actually feel threatened by any country that is not stamped with the United States’ “seal of approval” or do we simply have a love affair with weapons and warfare?

If it’s the former then we’re going to be at war, with someone, forever, but I think it’s a little bit of both and shame on us for that.

Arthur Saginian Santa Clarita