While I usually enjoy reading the articles in The Collegian, I must take issue with Mr. Pope’s remarks regarding ISIS and U.S. “democracy.” Not only is Mr. Pope wrong, he’s stupid and I mean that, with all due respect. Thomas Hobbs said: “War is the natural state of man.” He happened to be quoting Plato. As far back as we can go through written history, this rings true.

Yet, Mr. Pope has either never taken a humanities class, never read Plato and Hobbs, or he must have flunked political science 101, because his assertion that ISIS was created by the U.S., although to the less informed is a valid argument, rests on faulty assumptions.

ISIS and the Islamic insurgency came to be a cancer under the stewardship of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But this seemingly lack of understanding regarding foreign policy can be forgiven because most students couldn’t find Iowa on a map let alone understand the intricacies of American involvement abroad.

However, what is most shocking is his blind analysis of U.S. “democracy.” The United States is, indeed, a republic, not a democracy.

To the extent that the U.S. has moved away from its republican roots and become more “democratic,” it has strayed from the intentions of the Constitution’s authors. Whether or not the trend toward more direct democracy would be smiled upon by the framers depends on the answer to another question.

Are the American people today sufficiently better informed and otherwise equipped to be wise and prudent democratic citizens than were American citizens in the late 1700s? After reading Mr. Pope’s opinion piece, the answer to this second question is an emphatic “no.”

This article is in reference to “With Saddam Hussein gone, The US helped create ISIS.”