To the editor:

The Bush administration insists the goal of its war in Iraq is to spread democracy to the Middle East. In our midterm elections, the majority of American voters strongly differed with the administration’s policy by overwhelmingly voting against the war, an example of exercising our democratic process.

Rather than follow the mandate of voters, President Bush deliberately disregarded the will of the American people and instead is sending 22,000 additional troops to Iraq.

Is this what “democracy” in America is defined as, where a president can summarily defy the decisions of voters and unilaterally place himself above the law of the land in unashamed defiance and contempt of the democratic process to do what he pleases? Is this our message to the world?

Americans, it appears, today have as much control over President Bush as the Iranians have over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the North Koreans over Kim Jong Il, men who have seized power and set themselves up as demigods. How are we any better if we permit this to happen in America to us?

If Americans accept Mr. Bush’s actions, then we have lost democracy; we will have become a farce, a mockery of the democratic free system we once embraced as a shining example for the world to emulate. Is this the reason America went to war? Is this what our military men and women are dying for in Iraq? Is this who we, the people, have finally become?

Curtis D. Bennett,

Lawrence