Sir, - Allow me to express admiring support for the case lucidly made by John Gormley, TD (May 24th).
What form of lunacy has overtaken fairly intelligent people like our Taoiseach if they really believe NATO has peace as its objective? NATO is a military alliance, which like so many military alliances in the past, must either make war to justify its expensive existence or one day so scare some other group of nations (poorer, no doubt, and not so white) by its bullying assumption of world policemanship that it will attack NATO. In practical terms, partnership with NATO means partnership in launching a thousand missiles in one day against electric power stations, water supplies, bridges, roads, railways and water transport, in a country whose civilian population was falsely (knowingly so) told it was not going to be targeted, as happened to Yugoslavia on May 22nd.
Partnership with NATO means offloading scores of unused bombs, risking the lives and hurting the livelihood of fishermen citizens of the partnership, as NATO aircraft are doing over the Adriatic. It means condoning the use of cancer-spreading ammunition, contaminating drinking water, poisoning the air, polluting rivers flowing into states uninvolved in NATO's arrogant show-off of its multimillion bullying capacity - all of which was illustrated in articles, photos and diagrams on May 23rd in your distinguished Madrid counterpart El Pais.
Those demanding our partnership with NATO want to line us up with a clique of self-important, self-righteous, overpaid and overspoilt megalomaniacs in London and Washington, who cheerily condoned the break-up of original Yugoslavia and its inevitable spawning of more blatant and uncouth self-seekers of their own, like Tudjman and Milosevic. These sinister but outwardly so respectable megalomaniacs (who probably never suffered a day's want, let alone a night's air-raid), see themselves as a nuclear-weapon-backed police force entitled to impose their views on the world, ignoring millions of Africans, Arabs, Asians, Latin Americans and, I believe, Irish, who have never voted for NATO as world policemen or war as a means of creating peace.
It cannot be stressed too much that NATO is a military alliance, not an agreed representative of the whole international community. Military-dominated bodies (backed by notoriously greedy merchants of weapons of mass destruction) inevitably end up sponsoring regimes of unbelievable cruelty, stupidity and corruption, as brilliantly exposed by Juan Mendez, Argentine lawyer, who had seen at first hand how four of these operated, in an unforgettable BBC World Service programme at 1 a.m. on May 24th.
Difficult international problems with their roots deep in long-past history are not solved by war - as we know well in our country. Ireland above all, with her experience, should be shouting for strengthening and reform of the United Nations, not for partnership with a suspect gang that flouts the UN's authority. - Yours, etc. John de Courcy Ireland,
Dalkey, Co Dublin.