Madam, - Eoin Ryan's response (March 31st) to Peadar Kirby's article on globalisation and terrorism is an attempt to justify Bertie Ahern's blind support for the US administration's war on Iraq. To defend the Irish Government's position, he uses an argument eloquently proposed by Richard Perle in his recent book, An End to Evil: How to win the war on terror.
Perle's premise is that America must drain the swamps that feed the terrorist machine. Richard Perle is a hard-liner of the Bush administration who sees the world in terms of good and evil. However, Peadar Kirby painted a much more complex picture in his article. The US administration cleverly created a dividing line between those "for" and "against", which didn't allow Bertie to take a middle ground. The US administration has many agendas. Richard Perle has a messianic desire to rid the world of evil by draining the swamps that feed terrorism while Dick Cheney wants his company, Haliburton, to drain the oil wells. Meanwhile, our Eoin Ryan uses the simplistic "good vs evil" argument to placate us into accepting our Government's uninformed reaction to a very complex situation.
NEIL KENEALY,
Park View Avenue,
Harold's Cross,
Dublin 6.