PHILIP DONNELLY,
Sir, - Your newspaper will soon have to change its title to "The Déjà Vu Times", so monotonous have its denunciations of America and its President become over the past few months. Reading your Opinion page of March 28th, a sense of baffled frustration crept over me as I scanned articles penned by Harry Browne and Michael McCaughan, both of which lashed into the United States and its perfidious foreign policy. Hadn't I read all this before?
Mr McCaughan's feature was based on state records declassified by the US government, detailing attempts to eliminate Fidel Castro. Mr McCaughan might like to reflect that, were he to try and write a piece investigating Cuban efforts to assassinate various American leaders, he would have very little to write about because, unlike the US, which is a free country, Cuba is a dictatorship, run by a dictator for his own benefit, regardless of what the Cuban people themselves want. Vile autocracies like these do not release their secret documents, preferring instead to keep them locked away, much like their internal opponents.
And while Mr McCaughan correctly identifies Lyndon Johnson's chicanery in precipitating the Vietnam conflict, he is curiously silent on Castro's own imperialist adventuring. Throughout the 1970s, he dispatched thousands of Cuban troops to train and fight with Marxist rebels in Angola and Mozambique, bringing chaos and death to those parts of Africa. Hardly the behaviour of a revolutionary hero.
Mr Browne's article deplores the new American "global empire", ticking all the usual boxes in a checklist of accusations against the scheming superpower, right down that strangely endurable myth of the daisy-cutter bomb and its Afghan victims.
If we are indeed living in the sphere of American influence, I for one am glad. American values are those of democracy, justice, enterprise and tolerance - qualities so conspicuously lacking in many parts of the globe. Tyrants and theocrats the world over look with hatred and envy at the US, realising that the rights and freedoms they deny their hapless subjects are the sole basis for America's astonishing success. I believe America is to be commended, not condemned, for defending its citizens and their way of life, and in the process bringing some semblance of peace to others less fortunate.
Journalistic darts of liberal resentment will not, I hope, deflect the US, from seeing this struggle through to the end. - Yours, etc.,
PHILIP DONNELLY,
Newbridge,
Co Kildare.