Embracing an Ideal

The Washington Post Company :Saturday, January 12, 2002; Page A19

I appreciate your criticizing those nations and companies that have offered support to the despised dictatorship in Burma, including your naming of the U.S. corporation Unocal [editorial, Jan. 6].

You rightly criticize such "engagers" as Russia for selling the Burmese military junta MiG-29 fighters, but then you assert that this support demonstrates Russia's "less than full embrace of the democratic values it claims now to cherish."

You neglect the possibility that the same conclusions could be reached regarding U.S. arms sales to undemocratic regimes such as those in Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Does U.S. military aid to these dictatorships represent our own "less than full embrace" of the democratic values we claim to cherish?

You suggest that when the brutal regime in Burma finally falls, "most Burmese people are likely to remember who stood with them and who sided with their oppressors."

Are you not concerned that the same will be true of those democratic reformers who are today jailed in China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere?

Rick Rowden