Letters submitted by BDN readers are verified by BDN Opinion Page staff. Send your letters to letters@bangordailynews.com
Very few communities of our size have a daily paper in print of the high quality of the Bangor Daily News. Delivered to your door. Literate, engaged with the community and sophisticated enough to provide analysis of world events. We should count our blessings. They sailed through the COVID restrictions without missing a beat. I question the BDN’s coverage of the Ukraine War.
A brilliant head fake to Kherson on the southern coast then an attack on Kharkiv in the north gives the freedom fighter of Ukraine a clean victory on the ground. Volodymyr Zelensky uses the win to ask the West to accelerate weapons shipments to repel Russian terror.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken had just visited Kyiv, probably to get Ukraine to the negotiating table but was upstaged by Ukraine’s offensive in the north. Our European allies are twisting in the wind, cut off from Russian oil and gas. Undoubtedly, they are burning up the telephone lines to the U.S. State Department begging for a reprieve before the weather closes in on them. That’s the update of this mess.
Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia (on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now TV program) speaks of the
militarization of American foreign policy over the last 30 years. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan. “We are driving to the precipice,” he says. Pax Americana has assumed the mantle of the British Empire, with the same rationales to be almost constantly at war. The mindset, Sachs says, is, “we run the world.”
Time to step back and reconsider. This is how world wars get started, with the sinking of the Lusitania or an incident in Sarajevo. Maybe it’s too late to expect the BDN to reverse its cheerleading for this faraway war, but let’s not be promoting a coming attraction in the Taiwan Straits.
Tom Deegan
Orono