Sir, - I would like to express my total opposition to the bombing of Iraq by the US and the UK. I oppose this international terror for three reasons.
The children of Iraq have been dying in their thousands for lack of medicines due to sanctions by Western countries against Iraq, but now they, their parents and fellow countrymen and women are being sent cruise missiles and bombs for alleged sins that are certainly not of their making.
War is at all times evil and barbaric. Its victims are always the weak and vulnerable. It is particularly monstrous to send in bombers and missiles that are going to kill innocent people. And it is even more reprehensible when this fact is known beforehand and acknowledged.
The instrument of war, apart from its inherent wrongness, is useless in furthering any just cause or achieving any just objective. The previous carnage in Iraq has proven this. And over a quarter of a century of bloodshed in our own country has also demonstrated it.
The irony is that those who have been so correctly preaching the value of peaceful negotiations around the world, including Ireland, have reneged on their own advice and chosen war as their preferred option. In so doing they are sending out a clear and awful message to terrorists everywhere that war is a rational alternative, thus perpetuating the war-monger philosophy for future generations. To paraphrase Macbeth, they do but teach bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.
As an individual and ordinary human being, I call on two other individual human beings - admittedly not ordinary in the offices they hold - Mr Bill Clinton and Mr Tony Blair to call off this outrage against ordinary people and find a more civilised way of settling their differences with the dictator, Saddam Hussein. - Yours, etc., Justin Morahan,
Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.