Theodore Bosen: The nuances of war, now in the Middle East

To the editor:

On one side is a country that unwittingly elevated an unhinged tyrant into office by popular demand, who then handed the reins of power to a fringe minority of extremists, hellbent on refashioning society into a draconian dystopia governed by a cult that worships a hateful God and ostracizes all those who refuse to submit to its corrupt feudal oligarchy, arresting, and even murdering, people in the streets for exercising their fundamental rights of assembly and political expression — a country where cadres of secret police, employing ruthless tactics, roam neighborhoods, rounding up targeted minorities and dissenters, and imprisoning them without trial — a country which arms its proxies in the region with weapons of terror to indiscriminately kill innocent civilians while seeking to exterminate disfavored ethnic enclaves and their protectors — a country which boasts of the power to wipe out any who oppose it, even floating veiled threats of nuclear conflagration in the course of proselytizing a heretical, fiery apocalypse in which only its chosen survive.