Sir, - So, a few score, perhaps hundreds of Iraqis, probably undernourished already, are to be obliterated. Is this supposed to prove that a government that bullies its subjects and ignores its international obligations is liable to see its country become a practice target for the latest in lethal weaponry?
Of course, governments that ignore their legal obligations to the tune of $1.4 billion (which is what the US owes the UN) are exempt from any penalty. Outsize bullies usually are. And what about governments notorious for bullying their subjects, whose rights they were supposed to protect by international obligation, like those of Somoza, Mobutu, Balista, Pinochet and a dozen others? They were exempt from the target-practice punishment because they were, in various degrees, satellites of Washington, the biggest bully of all.
Is it not time to wake up to the fact that the US government and its obedient satellite in London are wasting millions of dollars at their subjects' expense keeping a great military machine operational in the Persian Gulf, not because Saddam is a bully, but because the Gulf is the key to the world's major oil resources, over which Washington and London demand domination?
I think people here are unlikely to show much sympathy for Washington or London in their row with Saddam (who, don't forget, acquired all his "know-how" about weapons of mass destruction from countries now passing judgment on him), until they start cutting down their own bloated resources of weapons of mass destruction. They might then give up using hospitals in Grenada, civilian dwellings in Panama, hotels and bunkers in Baghdad, harbours in Nicaragua, beaches in Cuba, whole cities like Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unarmed citizens in Derry, as targets to prove the extravagance of their strength and the enormity of their arrogance - qualities which will hopefully not win in the next century the terrified respect which they have mercilessly exacted for them in this one.
Finally, there is no doubt that the prospect of extensive germ warfare, the idea of which did not originate in Iraq or any other small or medium state, is so horrific as to be almost unimaginable. But what is the real likelihood of a US-British "air strike" really eliminating it? And when are the US, Britain and other "big" powers going to open up their germ-warfare laboratories to international inspection? Has the time not come to start converting the UN into a body genuinely representative of world public opinion, not open to manipulation by any government however powerful, endowed with the resources necessary to perform it's task? A huge undertaking, but worthy of a new millennium. - Yours, etc., John De Courcy Ireland,
Dalkey,
Co Dublin.