To the editor:
Perhaps growing up and learning about my mother’s childhood spent as an evacuee from Hitler’s attacks is why I’ve never considered the U.S. invulnerable, but I never imagined we’d be told to make peace with a national security peril.
Much of the U.S. military lives among us as members of the Reserves and National Guard, so it is illogical from a national-defense standpoint that this president and Iowa’s senators would let COVID-19 so ravage America. Why have Sen. Joni Ernst and Sen. Chuck Grassley allowed the president to surrender?
On six occasions in June, Russian military aircraft were intercepted by U.S. and Canadian Air Forces near Alaska. Putin launched another nuclear submarine to join Russia’s northern fleet, exploiting the melting Arctic sea ice. The UFO videos released by the Pentagon that we shrugged off in April should raise questions when we learn that China and Russia both report having maneuverable hypersonic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Iowa’s senators have had months to persuade Trump to put the Defense Production Act into force in order to produce life-saving supplies and to demonstrate leadership on simple actions that other countries quickly adopted as effective firebreaks against COVID-19.
Serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Ernst long ago should have begun an investigation into the national security threats created by the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response. (Now she should add an investigation into how this administration came to allow Putin to place and pay out bounties to the Taliban on the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan.)
The U.S. infection rate ranks third highest on earth at 867.9 per 100,00 people, exceeded only by Chile and Peru and followed by Brazil, Russia, Iran, Columbia and Mexico, according to Johns Hopkins University data. I refuse to accept any elected official who tells us that Americans must learn to live with this pathetic standing in the world.
Lauren Holst
Cedar Falls
