Madam, - Trócaire's director, Justin Kilcullen, shamefully misquotes the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz at the recent Asian Security Council (June 13th).
He has Wolfowitz saying, "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."
What Wolfowitz actually said was: "The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq."
The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The Guardian posted the misquotation on its website on June 4th and published a correction the following day.
Mr Kilcullen should apologise to you and your readers. One would expect Trócaire to welcome the liberation of the Iraqi people from murderous tyranny, but anti-US ideology and hatred seem to come before humanitarianism. - Yours, etc.,
TONY ALLWRIGHT,
Killiney,
Co Dublin.
Madam, - Before the war on Iraq, the US and UK made much of two issues. First, the primary rationale for the war was to deal with the imminent threat of Iraq's weapons of WMDs. Secondly, in the aftermath of the war, democracy was to be brought to the Iraqi people.
It now seems the first issue was a mere pretext for war - a device to "sell" the validity of the war to the undecided. Not only have no WMDs been found, but representatives of both the US and the UK are now playing down the significance of the whole WMD issue - Donald Rumsfeld going so far as to suggest that perhaps the WMDs were destroyed before the war started!
What about the second issue? It seems that the "coalition" also has its own views on who should rule Iraq and who should not do so. The US side clearly has its favourites for the task and a prominent British Labour MP, Ann Clywd, announced on RTÉ radio the other day that the coalition did not want power "falling into the wrong hands".
Doesn't democracy mean that the people should decide that issue?
Or will we soon begin to realise that all the talk about democracy was just another way to sell the war in the first place - that it really was about oil and strategic advantage all along? - Yours, etc.,
HARRY McCAULEY,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.