‘America always does the right thing, as soon as every other option is exhausted’
Quite a prescient piece in your January 22 edition («Democracy and its enemies»). President Bush may be guilty of idealism, but you seem to defy the laws of physics: You sit on both sides of the seesaw ready to submit an «I told you so» whatever the outcome of the US mission in Iraq. Is Bush’s idealism so revolutionary? Isn’t it just a restatement of Kant’s thesis that democracies tend to militate against militancy? Even as the new pan-democracy may fall short, as Greeks and inheritors of Platonic asymptotic idealism, we should embrace this restatement of policy as the apotheosis of Churchill’s statement: «America always does the right thing, as soon as every other option is exhausted.» STAMATIS KOUNARIS, Newington, CT USA.
