Sir, - After the horrors of the "Great" War the League of nations was set up as the instrument to prevent more wars. The US government, out of moral cowardice and greed, refused to join. Other "great" powers nearly all did join, with varying reluctance. Most small powers did so with alacrity, having learned history's lesson that big states tend to look on small ones as exploitable and expendable.
We joined. Early Irish State leaders like McGilligan and de Valera, whatever may be posted up against them, had the wit to know that small powers have little hope save in close co-operation. My generation, who had heard of the ghastliness of the 1914 war, and many of whom had lost close relatives in it, grew up in the 1920s believing there would be no repetition. But the "great" powers refused to use the League of Nations machinery, and fatally and foolishly fell back on military alliances and military advice to maintain peace.
Fortunately, in Ireland there has always been a suspicion of military intervention in politics and our military, despite strong pressure from some directions at one critical stage, have had the sense to stick to their own problems. But the pages of modern history stink with military dictators, from two Napoleons in the last century to the Francos and the Chiang Kai-Sheks, the Stroessners, the Perons and the Pinochets, the Suhartos and the Idi Amins of our time. (Note how rarely admirals become dictators; the almighty seas teach them sense that ambitious generals cannot grasp.)
If the "great" powers had really wanted peace in the Balkans they would not have connived at the break-up of Tito's Yugoslavia, which despite its limitations, drew South Slavs closer together, as they, and indeed all human kind should be, and created a mercifully neutral non-aligned alliance standing between the bellicose blocks of the "great" powers. It was partly to punish Yugoslavia for that that it was encouraged to disintegrate. Now it has disintegrated the "great" Western powers, having created catastrophe, are pretending to be champions of righteousness in trying to restore order.
Meanwhile some Irish politicians, no doubt with good intentions but without a shred of sense or notion of modern history, are trying to draw us into NATO, with its £1 million-a-time cruise missiles and its leaders nauseatingly boasting of their compassionate natures - when they let Suharto slaughter half-a-million people without protest, condoned Pinochet's torture of his political opponents and drove 40,000 people out of their homes at Diego Garcia to make a bomber-base there - not to mention their indifference to endless slaughter in Angola and the savagery (worse than Milosevic's) of the Sierra Leonese punishment squads who hack off the hands of their prisoners.
Am I really to suppose that the leading politician of a NATO power (the US) who declared that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying for the security of US oil interests in the Gulf cares a damn about the suffering of Kosovo's Albanians?
Surely what sensible people everywhere should do is to get the world's problems back into the hands of the United Nations, demand that the "great" powers with their vast military budgets finance the UN adequately, and realise that NATO, representing - in so far as it represents anyone - almost entirely white people, and particularly the small minority of whites making huge profits out of arms sales, is heaping up for the white people a store of hatred and contempt that could one day destroy all civilisation off this earth. - Yours, etc., John De Courcy Ireland,
Dalkey, Co Dublin.