Madam, - Your columnist Mark Steyn plumbed new depths with his article "The politics of rattling Iraq's cups" (The Irish Times, April 12th) in which he plainly expressed a preference for "blowing up buildings and causing a lot of death and destruction".
While a wide spectrum of views on any subject is welcome and necessary, do you really believe we need to be exposed to the opinion that the coalition forces are not killing enough people in Iraq? Apparently so, as Steyn criticises the US forces for using laser-guided weapons in the vicinity of a mosque in Falluja to avoid destroying the building. Steyn would "have been quite happy to see it blown up with the old-school, non-laser, imprecise weapons".
Is there something different about the war in Iraq that makes calls for more violence somehow acceptable in your newspaper? Mr Steyn objects to the "sensitivity of the coalition" even as hundreds of people lie dead after the US response to the killing of four contractors - even though Mr Steyn himself notes that only a few dozen people were involved in any way with that atrocity. He believes in the necessity for the Americans to "crush the other guys" in order to show who is in control, such a show of strength being apparently the only thing that those fickle Arabs understand.
I believe you owe your readers an explanation of why you see the need to publish Mr Steyn's incredibly offensive material, with its clear endorsement of violence and its racist stereotypes of Arabs. - Yours, etc.,
PAUL CARROLL, Churchfield, Clane, Co Kildare.