Madam, - Mr George Dempsey writes (June 23rd) that his book From the Embassy tackles the "vicious misrepresentation in Ireland of American foreign policy". He blames Irish editors for allowing their writers to "make such untrue assertions" as "vilification designed to portray America as a brutal country". No doubt, as a past contributor to The Irish Times, reporting on political issues in Latin America, he would include me as misrepresenting benign US foreign policy in their so-called "back yard".
It was only benign to the despots who supported US foreign policy whilst brutalising their own people.
In 1998 I wrote in World View that President Salvador Allende of Chile had complained at the UN Assembly on December 4th 1972: "We find ourselves faced with forces which operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons". Allende was describing the efforts of the Nixon administration to undermine his democratically elected government. Vicious misrepresentation?
In 1976 a US Select Committee under the chairmanship of Frank Church concluded, "there is no doubt that the US government sought a military coup in Chile".
I also wrote on how US oil companies such as Texaco inflicted irreversible and indiscriminate destruction on large tracts of the Amazon rainforests in Ecuador. Vicious misrepresentation? In 1990, Robert F. Kennedy visited that country and, appalled at the pollution and destruction he witnessed, commented: "Like most United States citizens, I like to believe when American companies go abroad American values go with them. This hasn't happened in Ecuador. Today, American-owned companies are leaving an ugly legacy of poverty and contamination in one of the most important forests on Earth". I could fill this page with similar "vicious misrepresentations".
Having criticised the writers that do not support the foreign policy of his country he lashes out, like a bully cornered in the schoolyard, and puts our alleged anti-US attitude down to "small-country resentment" and "Ireland's powerlessness to effect significant results on the international scene". Now we know. We lack the firepower to invade countries like Iraq.
Dempsey concludes his article by writing that "until human beings turn into angels, there remains the ongoing need for violence. Human rights are secured by the rule of law which is secured by enforcement". His last paragraph probably explains the US style of law enacted in prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN T KAVANAGH, Braemor Road, Dublin 14.
Madam, - George Dempsey (June 23rd) claims that while Saddam Hussein's regime received weapons from countries such as France and South Africa, "none came, directly or indirectly, from the US". He appears unaware of the 1994 US Senate hearings, chaired by Senator Donald Riegle, which revealed that "from 1985, if not earlier, through 1989, a veritable witch's brew of biological materials were exported to Iraq by private American suppliers pursuant to application and licensing by the US Department of Commerce."
These pathogenic agents included bacillus anthracis, cause of anthrax and histoplasma capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord and heart.
The hearings went on to report that "these micro-organisms exported by the US were identical to those the UN inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program."
In his memoir Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, George Shultz cites a declassified CIA report which noted Iraq's use of mustard gas in August, 1983. In December, 1983 special envoy Donald Rumsfeld delivered a hand-written note to Saddam from President Reagan urging a resumption of "diplomatic relations" with Iraq. This included $4.7 billion in financial credits to Saddam's regime over the next six years.
Mr Dempsey might see this as a "hard and imperfect choice" that had to be made against the backdrop of Iranian fundamentalism.
This support for Saddam, however, had nothing to do with Cold War survival; it was a gesture of strategic and economic hegemony in the Middle East which had dire humanitarian consequences.
Mr Dempsey advises that we base our judgment of US foreign policy on "demonstrable facts" and that we "draw our conclusions from the facts in a fair-minded and logical manner". Before chastising the Irish media for "anti-Americanism", he should consider applying these principles to his own analysis. His insulting charges of "small-country resentment" and "self-fulfilling folk memories" call to mind two lines from Yeats that best sum up this style of debate: "They must to keep their certainty accuse/ All that are different of a base intent" (The Leaders of the Crowd). - Yours, etc.,
LIAM QUAIDE, North Great Georges Street, Dublin 1.