Madam, - How ironic that the welcome release of the journalist Rory Carroll should have come so quickly because, it seems, he had the good luck to be kidnapped by members of Iraq's Shia majority. This is the community about whose liberation from oppression your newspaper, not alone in these islands, has been so relentlessly negative ever since the US-led invasion.
Past experience tells us that Mr Carroll's fate might have been horribly different had he become a captive of the so-called "resistance", that coalition of Saddamites and al-Zarqawi jihadists whose every objection to the attempts to build democracy has been given such prominence and respectability in your columns.
Lest a word of hers be taken as even the mildest suggestion that any good has flowed from the occupation, your correspondent Lara Marlowe saw fit to denigrate Sunday's referendum as the "democratic process" (her inverted commas) devised by the "US occupation forces" (The Irish Times, October 17th). She went on to retail sectarian anti-Shia remarks by a solitary Sunni student (no Shia was asked for a balancing opinion on the formerly dominant Sunnis), before devoting a full paragraph to the unsubstantiated belief of one Sunni leader that the referendum result was already a fix. (Many in the Middle East believe that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Jews - why not give that fantasy equal prominence?). Since then she has been on the radio, calling the Shia suburb of Baghdad a "den of thieves".
In case we didn't read the full article, the front-page headline was there to divine for us that, within mere hours of the close of polling, the vote had already led to an increase in sectarian tensions. On an inside page, another headline about "weary Iraqis" was contradicted by a picture of smiling women displaying inked fingers. But even before the vote took place, your Editorial of October 15th had told us it would all be "a hollow exercise".
When the black majority community in South Africa finally took power following free and fair elections in 1994, it was generally held to be a cause for rejoicing. The reservations of Afrikaners about the new order were not high among the concerns of Western bien-pensant journalists.
No rejoicing, however, is allowable in the case of the liberation of the Kurds and Shias, who comprise 80 per cent of the Iraqi population. Such is the determination of anti-war journalists to give no credit to the efforts of the US and its allies that this liberation and the democratising process, made possible only by the overthrow of Saddam, must be acknowledged only in the most grudging manner, while every setback must be highlighted.
A spurious "neutrality" is used in sections of the Irish media to belittle the achievements of the Iraqi majority, while the atrocities of al-Zarqawi's suicide bombers against Shia marketplaces and mosques, self-confessedly aimed at provoking civil war, are played down.
It is reminiscent of a similar mindset in evidence in 1945 when Mr de Valera chose a fastidious protocol over recognition of the evil staring him in the face and duly went to offer his condolences on the death of Herr Hitler. - Yours etc.,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.
Madam, - While the kidnapping of the Irish journalist Rory Carroll last Wednesday was a potential tragedy, it was lamentable that your Editorial of the following day devoted so little space to the beginning of the historic trial of Saddam Hussein.
Moreover, you devoted undue attention to the legitimacy or otherwise of the trial when surely the fact that Saddam is actually standing trial at all is of singular importance. Many Iraqis will feel this is an historic event, perhaps even the start of a process whereby they can achieve some sort of closure.
Perhaps, rather than focusing on the "resistance" ( which is increasingly targeting innocent Iraqi civilians and not American soldiers), surely it is more important to acknowledge the undoubted progress that has already been made in Iraq. Who could possibly have imagined three years ago that Saddam would be held accountable for his crimes?
We should strive to focus on the positive if we genuinely wish to see a stable and free Iraq emerge. - Yours, etc,
BEN WEATHERILL, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.