Sir, - As the attention of the world moves from the stunned grief for those massacred in the USA to the response of the Bush administration and its allies, Ireland will have a historic responsibility as chair of the UN Security Council.
The scale and depth of Ireland's day of mourning will help to copper-fasten our bona fides with the American people and its administration. Our record as a neutral country, and the work of UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson, have established our credibility with the poorer nations of the developing world. We will need both, and every shred of diplomatic skill, if we are to play our part to ensure that the UN and the US adopt lawful and effective measures to find and prosecute the guilty and to develop a new global anti-terrorist policy.
The former objective primarily poses a short to medium-term intelligence and military problem. But the latter constitutes a far more difficult and dangerous prospect not merely for the world community but, if we are to do our duty as president of the Security Council, for our country's relationship with the United States. No independent and neutral nation can accept President Bush's threatening ultimatum that any nation that is not for the US is against it. It also behoves our Government, as it takes on its historic UN role, to insist that the US itself ceases to act according to the very definition of a terrorist state that President Bush articulated last week.
Since the second World War many nations have had reason to thank the US for the political freedoms they enjoy. Not only that, but the response of the US to the peoples of the defeated Axis powers was extraordinary in its generosity. But for many of the world's peoples, the experience of United States foreign policy has been as victims of a terrorist foreign policy. Economic and geo-political considerations have motivated the US to overthrow or sponsor terrorism against democratically elected and peaceful governments throughout the world, especially on the American continent - e.g. Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973 and Nicaragua in the 1980s, when the current president's father was Ronald Reagan's vice-president.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous description of the attack on Pearl Harbour as "a day that shall live in infamy" has been much quoted in past weeks, but his support for Anastasio Somoza, the ruthless dictator of Nicaragua, is less well known; it was summarised in Roosevelt's assessment that "he may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch".
If the fight against those who perpetrated last week's atrocities is to succeed in the long term, the United States itself must forgo the use and sponsorship of terrorism. As a friend to the US government and the American people, it is essential, however difficult, that our Government, in its forthcoming UN role, insists that this principle is accepted by all parties in the Security Council, including the United States. - Yours, etc.,
Cllr Ciaran Byrne, (Labour Party), Skerries Road, Balbriggan, Co Dublin.