Sir, - Let me assure Jack Lewis (November 30th) that I was well from very early of the inhuman barbarity of the Nazi regime - I first met it in a cargo ship in 1930 - and of the Russian gulags. These, however, lasted less than half-a-century, while the insidious and systematic intervention of US governments in the affairs, first of Latin America, then of almost the whole world, is two centuries old, and more revolting because it is always carried out with a barrage of nauseating, self-righteous proclamations. Fortunately there are many US citizens who deplore their government's uninvited assumption of the role of judge, jury and executioner in world affairs.
How can any sane person trust a government, one of whose highest officials, Senator Moynihan, former US Ambassador to the UN, boasted publicly, when in (1975) the US government was covering up the enormities in East Timor of its protege Suharto, who had seized power in a coup that brought about more than a million deaths in Indonesia: "The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success." So much for the contemptuous attitude of the US government towards a world organisation which it is very ready to use when it suits, though equally contemptuous about paying its annual membership fee.
As for Mr Lewis's "inadvertent civilian casualties" resulting from US military operations in other lands, he should know that an authoritative article in the London Times the day the last air-strike on Iraq was called off calmly declared that the strike would inevitably bring 10,000 civilian casualties. Inadvertent? And it is a pity he did not hear Robert Fisk last month broadcasting from southern Iraq about the scores of Iraqi children dying horribly of cancer as a result of the US having used "tens of thousands" and the British "thousands" of cancer-bearing shells during the Gulf War.
I would like to share Mr Lewis's naive admiration for the Marshall Plan, the World Bank and all the other financial manipulations by which US governments stimulate the famous "market"; but is it not still as obvious as it was when these financial campaigns were instituted that their major objective was to revive or develop destroyed or weak economies to suit the needs of a US economy cluttered up with surplus goods and cash? - Yours, etc., John De Courcy Ireland,
Dalkey, Co Dublin.