Madam, - Congratulations are due to Tim Ryan (April 14th) for penning what must surely be the most nauseatingly unctuous, morally inert diatribe yet to emerge from the great deluded mass of Irish America-haters.
Are we supposed to be impressed by his travel-guide allusions to "the broken walls of Old Samarra," his T.E. Lawrence yarns about sharing jokes, picnics, wedding feasts with "the resilient colourful people"? The real calibre of Mr Ryan's concern for the Iraqis - those same people, many of whom, just for the record, were tortured, gassed, and shovelled into mass graves - can be gauged from his outrageously euphemistic references to Saddam's "cruelty" and "indiscretions." Try telling the relatives of the slaughtered Kurds that Saddam was nothing worse than indiscreet. The sheer effrontery of such language-abuse takes the breath away.
This, surely, is what the Arab commentator Fouad Ajami meant when he insisted that the "political culture that averts its gaze from mass graves and works itself into self-righteous hysteria over a foreign presence in an Arab country is a culture that has turned its back on all political reason".
I would go further and contend that the species of rabid, unreasoning anti-Americanism typified by the Irish peace crowd borders on a genuine pathology.
How else to account for the hyper-inflation of Ryan's rhetoric when he contends that the Iraq war has caused Arabs - all Arabs? - to hate "every Englishman or American who ever lived". How else to account for the transparent shamelessness of his cheerleading for the thugs who will stop at nothing to subvert the progress to democracy which American intervention has made possible. "Hardened and effective fighters with field discipline" he calls them - so disciplined they can murder an innocent Italian civilian without batting an eyelid, I presume.
The abject failure of left-liberal groups to make informed moral choices, their pathological inclination to prefer anyone, even a psychopath like Saddam, to the demon of their adolescent fantasies, the Great Satan of the US, has been one of the least edifying aspects of this dismal period in world affairs. History will judge their ignorance much as it did the Hitler-appeasers of the 1930s and the pro-Soviet apologists of the Cold War era.
No wonder Bin Laden feels he can exploit Western irresolution. - Yours, etc.,
BERT WRIGHT, Hillside, Dalkey, Co Dublin.