Madam, - Despite all the rhetoric about freedom and democracy, America - that is to say, the America represented by its current leadership, not "all Americans" - is becoming increasingly intolerant and jingoistic. This is manifest in the hostile attitude to any criticism whatsoever from whomsoever concerning its policies on Iraq, as well as its increasingly hostile attitude to Europeans (notably the French), sometimes bordering on racism.
Intolerance of criticism and of others is not, of course, the trademark of a free and democratic society that cherishes difference and freedom of speech. What some American politicians and commentators seem unable to comprehend is that one is not necessarily "anti-American" simply because one is anti-Bush and opposes the US government's policies on Iraq. (Nor is one necessarily anti-Semitic because one is anti-Sharon.)
Moreover, we should not be fooled by American propaganda in its repeated attempts to identify Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler as a means of creating a feeling of greater danger than actually exists, and for the purpose of moral justification. Saddam's regime is violent and oppressive, and thus reprehensible. No one would shed a tear to see it go. This does not, however, warrant the equation of Saddam with Hitler. Saddam is a barbarous local dictator who has inflicted great suffering on his own people and others, notably the Kurds, by torture and murder.
Hitler was a horrific tyrant who created an evil empire that threatened human civilisation as such, establishing factory-like camps for the explicit purpose of systematic mass murder and genocide assisted by all state sectors - military, legal, economic, and political.
America's motive in making repeated comparisons between Hitler and Saddam and fostering a "war narrative" couched in words and phrases that pertain to a completely different situation - and which are therefore meaningless in the present context - is clear: the moral justification of an immoral war.- Yours, etc.,
SANDRA BONETTO, Moumtmellick, Co Laois.