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To the editor:
I am responding to the excellent piece from Jim Munn regarding America's response to the exploding situation in Egypt. ("My View," Times, Friday, Feb. 4.)
In a revealing bit of irony, Mr. Munn's article's coincides with an Associated Press story in which former Vice President Dick Cheney claims dictator Hosni Mubarek is a great friend of America.
In Cheney's America, our leaders do business with the likes of Mubarek on a regular basis, as though it is possible to separate our long-range strategic goals from the despots men like Cheney consider friends. It is precisely this amoral world view that has us bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American men and women in uniform are risking their lives on a daily basis because the Dick Cheneys in Washington once considered Saddam Hussein to be an equally useful friend.
No decent person can lay with filth like Mubarek, Hussein and a host of other despots around the world without forfeiting credibilty.
This amoral disconnect, this idiocy of pretending that the ends justify the means has given rise to the swelling hatred of America among the downtrodden victims of Cheney's friends, particularly in the Muslim world. At some point, the American people must insist that our representatives deal fairly with the people of the world and stop cozying up to their oppressors.
The real tragedy of 9/11 is that, at a moment in history when the world waited for America's response, when the opportunity was there to take the high road, we were kept in the muck by devious, coldly calculating people like Dick Cheney.
We simply cannot afford to continue to ignore the wishes of the people of the world simply to repay political favors to despised tyrants or we lose any semblance of moral leadership. America stands for freedom and democracy throughout the world and it is bad business and worse calling enemies of the people friends of America.
Mubarek, like Hussein before him, brutalized his countrymen and they should decide his fate, not the likes of Dick Cheney — friend of the rich, powerful and amoral; enemy of decent people everywhere.
jeff dunleavy
Gloucester
