Madam, - Like very many others I spent some time on Wednesday afternoon watching the scenes from Baghdad as they unfolded before the world. I then watched, listened, and, read how the truly historic events of the day were recapped by the various media.
I unequivocally believe a historically important event occurred. I unequivocally believe a very good thing happened. However, I also now begin to comprehend the unbelievable moral and intellectual hypocrisy of the "anti-war" constituency. The resentment and suspicion of all things American coloured their every reaction to the scenes of jubilation in Baghdad.
Why is it so difficult to see the absolute differences between what the coalition represents and Saddam Hussein embodies? Literally everything else about this "war" is debatable. Its origins, its consequences. However, our essential values should not be vague. Some realities really should be self-evident. If we fail to see this, We seem to be losing our sense of our own hard-won libertarian heritage. - Yours, etc.,
ANDREW JOHN QUINN, Wyvern, Killiney, Co Dublin.
Madam, - Question: What possesses an intelligent journalist to use the tragic death of a young Dublin man (An Irishman's Diary, April 10th) as the opening paragraph to a tirade of abuse, gloating and sheer vitriol against the tens of thousands of Irish people who exercised their right to have an opinion different from his?
Answer: Insensitivity, arrogance, self-righteousness or just plain thoughtlessness. Shame on Kevin Myers! - Yours, etc.,
NOREEN CARROLL, Kerrymount Close, Foxrock, Dublin 18.
Madam, - Thank God for a man like Kevin Myers, someone who speaks with intelligence, clarity and reason. He offers respect instead of contempt for the brave men and women fighting to ensure that Iraqis will have a better way of life.
This war was inevitable because all other avenues had been exhausted. It could so easily have been avoided but for the despotic Saddam, and in that case we would have continued to let the Iraqi people suffer endlessly. Only good can come for them now.
Those who took to the streets in anti-war demonstrations aligned themselves with a brutal and evil dictator who has killed and tortured millions of his own people. I am glad I live in a free country that has to be thankful to the US for keeping us and the rest of Europe free from Soviet dictatorship.
It's so unfortunate that war happened, and that thousands of people died. But but for the future of Iraq and its next generation, some hope now exists as it never did before.May God bless them all. - Yours, etc.,
PAUL MURPHY, Ardilaun Green, Mullingar, Co Westmeath.
Madam, - It was reported in recent days that after one American bombing raid on Baghdad, the casualties included a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who had lost his arms and both his parents.
This little lad, along with thousands like him, will be forever grateful for having been liberated by "Operation Freedom".
How the stomach turns when confronted with the hypocrisy of this so-called war of liberation.
If this savagery is the best solution to the world's problems in the early part of the 21st century, I say, "Stop the world - I want to get off". - Yours, etc.,
EILEEN MALONE, Butterfield Avenue, Dublin 14.
Sir, - Lately Mr John Waters has apparently been losing his grasp on rationality. Logical thought has been sliding through his fingers, and in its absence he has been dealing in what can most charitably be described as vaguely amusing junk.
On March 3rd, in a column headed "Fear must not rule our lives" (advice Mr Waters would be more prudently advised to take than dish out) he delves into the rationally grimy world of the pseudo-psychologist. He offers the viewpoint that thousands of anti-war protesters who marched in Dublin in February did so for one reason: "a sublimated dread of the consequences" - the consequences being a terrorist reprisal for the Irish Government's support of the war on Iraq.
The "fear" he describes is purely unconscious - the implication being that those who marched were not acting under fully conscious reasoned judgement, but on the basis of some more primitive impulse.
An amusing theory? Possibly. Unsubstantiated junk? Absolutely. "The presence of high levels" of fear to which Mr Waters alludes are (rather conveniently, I would suggest) completely "unspoken". He fails to point to any Freudian slips of tongue or pen. He fails to allude to any extra-linguistic evidence. He fails to provide any evidence whatsoever to substantiate his views. Unless of course one counts the march itself, but then his argument is circular, dictatorial (of the "it is because it is!" variety), and hardly worth printing.
It is also curious that the devious psychological attack upon "our" collective unconscious that he writes of is something to which he has an immunity. Why is it that Mr Waters has access to our unconscious drives and yet we don't?
Certainly this points to a grave logical deficiency. Yet what is more troubling, given that we are living in an increasingly multiethnic society, is the threat Mr. Waters suggests is posed to "us" and to "our civilisation" by "them". Who are "they"? Who are "we"? What war is Mr Waters really talking about? On March 23rd the vaguely irrational becomes clearly ludicrous, when Mr Waters deals with these questions more explicitly.
"We in the West are dealing with the greatest threat we have ever faced." Here he talks about being "pitted against a culture which does not share our values or perceptions". Is he referring to a culture of terrorism? No. The advent of the suicide bomber, he writes, has altered conditions between "us" and "them" (hence "they" are not terrorists), and "undermines any hope of a co-existence based on mutual deterrence".
Yet surely there is hope that we will ultimately attain a co-existence through some means? No, Mr Waters regrets that we cannot, for in a world of binary oppositions in which everything is all or nothing, east or west, good or evil, where one either supports the war or adopts Saddam Hussein as "a mascot"(March 3rd), the lines are crudely drawn, he writes: "If the West did not eliminate its enemies, they would eliminate the West".
Doublethink abounds. Amidst a supposedly heraldic analysis of 21st-century international relations, one almost forgets that one is not reading H.M Stanley, the renowned journalist and eminent racist of the late 19th century, or being called to arms against the "infidel" in Clermont almost a millennium ago by Pope Urban II. Yet of course, there are clear differences; for example "they", those Others who threaten "our" very existence, are not confined to the Islamic World; the "war" is bigger than that, given Mr Waters's definition of who "we" are. "There is a stark choice for those who live in the West, speak English and have white skin: we can join with America and Britain or take our chances alone."
Thus, after the race war to end all wars is finished and most of the world has been destroyed, we can get down to the messy business of dealing with those Irish-speakers in Gaeltacht areas who don't share "our" Americanised English-speaking culture.
The absurdity of such crude, ineptly formulated and evidently archaic views almost clouds how utterly disgraceful they are, and we are living in strange times indeed when such hack journalism is considered worthy of broadsheet publication. - Yours, etc.,
NILANTHA McPARTLAND, Grange Court, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.