Sir, - Is it psychologically - not to mention politically - wise, when trying to deal with a bully, to rely on the biggest bully available to deal with him?
The history of governments of the United States since that state was set up is one of unprecedented bullying of other peoples. No sooner was English control got rid of than the United States let loose a merciless campaign of oppression and decimation against the native peoples of North America. European peoples were warned off the American continent and the United States proceeded to rob Mexico of half of its territory.
Next, the United States sent warships to Japan, which may have been isolationist and backward but was, after all, a sovereign state. It was commanded by force to open its ports to foreign trade and another stage was complete in the evolving US plan to achieve commercial hegemony in the Pacific. A hundred years ago this year the US went to war with Spain and filched most of the remaining Spanish colonies, incidentally occupying Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which it still occupies with as little right as it had to Puerto Rico, the Philippines and other minor territories now annexed. Two years later a rebellious movement was set up in Colombia (the sort of act which US governments are always accusing foreigners of doing to them). Colombia's province of Panama declared itself independent and promptly in recompense let the US build a canal through its territory.
After three years spent making money out of both sides in the first World War, the US went to war with Germany in 1917, afraid that the Allies would fail to meet their debts for war material if defeated. When Germany was defeated the US had a president for once with some ideals, who proposed the establishment of a League of Nations, which, had it been a full League of Nations, could well have prevented the 1939 war. But the US Congress repudiated President Wilson's ideal and the US was left to chase profits unfettered by annoying obligations.
The US entered the second World War, not to defeat fascism but because Japan attacked it, and it came out of the war with strings of bases in the Pacific and the Antilles, occupation of which was never granted by the local inhabitants.
Since then the US has propped up a disgusting series of grotesque dictators, every bit as cruel as Sadam Hussein, such as Mobutu, Somoza, Sukarto and Pinochet, and mercilessly bombed residential areas in Vietnam and Panama City, a hospital in Grenada, a chemical works in Sudan, an innocent child in her cradle in Libya and dozens of civilians in Iraq, who were lyingly announced to be immune from war danger because US missiles and bombs were supposed to be able miraculously to distinguish civilians from military.
It is also noteworthy that the US administration enjoys talking tough to Colombia because drugs are smuggled from there to the US, which could not happen if US society did not provide the world with its most willing and wealthy drug market.
How much longer does the world have to take its political morality from a government which, with its predecessors, has caused more suffering through warlike acts than any other in the past 200 years? - Yours, etc., John De Courcy
Ireland, Dalkey, Co Dublin.