President’s State of Union Address

Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Me.) deserves praise for citing on national television the single compelling lesson to be learned from this war: that bankrolling dictators for “geopolitical” reasons will come back to haunt us later. For 10 years, the United States supported Saddam Hussein to counter a perceived Iranian threat. For the same 10 years, Americans were either aware of or asleep to his willingness to wage war, his brutal suppression of internal dissent and his victimization of Iraqi Kurds, culminating in his poison gas attack on Kurdish villages in 1988. Is it too much to ask that American 18-year-olds not have to die cleaning up a mess that we, along with the French, the Soviets and many others, helped create starting when they were 8-year-olds?

I, like Mitchell, favor an American foreign policy based on the support of democratic principles.

If there is a silver lining in this war, perhaps it is that Americans not previously involved in politics will begin to inform themselves--and speak up--about how America chooses its friends. Only then will we learn that not only does lack of adherence to democratic principles abroad aid tyranny, but so, too, does the lack of vitality in the democratic system at home.

PAUL MITTELBACH, Los Angeles