an open letter to nicholas bourne, a.m.



Childish comments about anti-war campaigners



Mr Bourne,



I find you comments on anti-war campaigners, as reported on icWales today, childish but, in a way you probably didn't expect, also reassuring that my views are correct.



I am, as you've probably guessed, anti-war. Not just anti- Iraqi-war but anti- all-war.



I do not believe that there are any circumstances under which any country's armed forces have the right to invade another country. To say that I should support "our boys" now that they're there is a nonsense. I don't believe that should have been deployed, so why should I support them?



As individuals I hope that they all return home safe, sooner rather than later, but as a force I think they shouldn't be there and shouldn't be supported. Stop trying to use people's natural concern for other humans in times of adversity to try to make some of us sound as if we don't care. We do, but on an individual level, not as an army, air force or navy.



I also do not believe that there is anything which cannot be resolved by peaceful means. Margaret Thatcher and her corporate whores always claimed that reform in S Africa could not be brought about by sanctions. What happened there? Reform happened because of the sanctions.



Sanctions could also have brought Saddam Hussein down, or at least helped to achieve this. But instead of doing what was done with S Africa, making life difficult for the regime, the sanctions which have been applied to Iraq have only hurt the innocents - the men, women and, especially, children who deserve a better life and NOT to be starved and deprived of essential medicines. But that's what you and your capitalist lackeys have given them.



Instead of waging war on those poor starving, diseased people, you should have been arming and organising them so that they could rise up against Saddam themselves. An imposed "democracy" will be useless.



The "democracy" in Afghanistan has meant the imposition of an oil company executive as president whose only job is to ensure that the oil pipelines get built. The country is in as bad or worse a state than it was when the Taliban were in control. Women are raped and murdered in equal numbers to the appalling way they were treated by the Taliban. Heroin production, the cessation of which was the only useful thing the Taliban ever did, is in full swing again. People are fearful, hungry and ignored by the very governments who promised to "liberate" them.



If supporting "our boys" means that I have to think it's OK to treat the Iraqis in the way the Afghans have been treated, if failure to support them makes me unpatriotic, then I'm not a patriot and I'm proud of it.



Why am I reassured? Well, if capitalists tell me something's right, I know it's wrong for most non-capitalists. You're a tool of the corporations so, if you say I'm wrong, I know I'm right.



A J Berrow