Lynn Rudmin Chong: America is not without its own bad actors

To The Daily Sun,

Scott Cracraft's letter about the intertwining of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump makes connections, including historical ones, not to forget. I want to add a few. All the time my heart is wringing for the families and cities and countryside disrupted by Putin's war on Ukraine, I am also remembering George W. Bush's touted "Shock and Awe" attack on Baghdad, Iraq, on March 19, 2003. I remember the date so well because my grandson was born the day before, in D.C. I was there. Bush kept announcing, announcing the date that would rain down bombs on citizenry in Baghdad, on buildings and modern infrastructure, turning it into the shambles we now see happening to Ukraine's metropolises, like Mariupol. As are Mariupol and Kyiv now, Baghdad had been a modern city with treasured relics of the old. George W. Bush at one point announced with some cheer, "This is the first war of the 21st century!" as if that were a positive. We got into war with the fable of weapons-of-mass-destruction there. A lie. Now Putin's lie to his country is that he's ridding Ukraine of Nazis. Trump frames Putin's war as a real estate deal in the making. Amoral.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright died at age 84. She's famous for saying of Clinton-era sanctions on Iraq, including on clorox that would provide clean drinking water for Iraqis in Baghdad, and a half-million children died without clean water, "We feel it was worth it." I include this because we've had our bad actors too, Democrats and Republicans alike. Albright has called her response to the Lesley Stahl question on 60 Minutes "a mistake."

At Plymouth State University in the Sidore Lecture Series, we once had guest historian Bill Blum, who said, catchily for my mind, "History is made of surprises." Looking at Albright's admission and Putin's current miscalculations, I'd add, "...and of mistakes." Now we face this enormous problem — how to cease this war, though with human's attraction to power and its uses, we'll probably see no going back to square one. Nothing can be the same.

Lynn Rudmin Chong

Sanbornton