US democracy brazenly corrupted

A RECENT editorial (June 6) might leave some people scratching their heads and wondering where you can have been during the last two US presidential elections.

You said:, “Whichever candidate succeeds we should all be grateful that the leader of the world's only superpower is elected by proclamation rather than imposed as a figurehead in a single party state, where political difference, let alone dissent, is not even tolerated.”

Neither of those elections was fairly won. Serious questions about vote rigging in Florida and elsewhere remain unanswered. There is a bitter irony in this for the rest of the world — and especially the Iraqi people, who have seen an estimated one million deaths as a consequence of the Bush administration’s claim to be ‘spreading democracy’ in, coincidentally, oil-rich regions.