MARY HARNEY TD,
Madam, - I have to take issue with your Editorial of February 24th, which seriously misrepresented my views. I did not state 100,000 marchers in Dublin were anti-American or that the left had infected their minds. That claim, was in fact, a misleading description of what I said, put out by the Labour Party and others.
The accurate, professional report by your chief political correspondent on Saturday stated that I had stressed I was not directing my remarks on anti-Americanism at the 100,000 marchers.
I said on Friday that "the extreme left in Ireland has always been virulently anti-American and anti-EU. And they want their ideas to infect more of the centre-ground." That is their intention.
I also said "reasonable people accept there is a difference between criticising the policies of a foreign government and being hostile to what that country fundamentally stands for."
I put the majority of the 100,000 demonstrators in the first category and a lot of the left wing in the second.
The central point for our foreign policy now is that if we really support the UN as the basis for international law, we must be prepared to uphold any further resolution by the Security Council aimed at achieving the disarmament of Saddam Hussein. - Yours, etc.
MARY HARNEY TD, Tánaiste, Leinster House.
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Madam, - While the US interpretation of Resolution 1441 appears to have been trumped by states that have denied it is a licence for a military attack on Iraq, other states, including Ireland, have remained ambiguous on the matter - as shown, for example, by Ireland's enabling the military build-up on Iraq's borders through the provision of refuelling at Shannon.
The preponderance of legal authority is that Resolution 1441 does not permit military action. In this regard, Ireland has failed in its international obligations. It has also failed to point out clearly and unambiguously that the threat of use of force is as explicitly prohibited by the UN Charter as the actual use of force, unless such threat or actual use is enabled by the Security Council and comes as a result of the exhaustion of all other means.
Ireland cannot make such an admission, being complicit in facilitating the creation of the threat. Any other resort to force or the threat of it can find justification only in the limited forms of the customary law of self-defence. Only a fantastical flight of the legal imagination would permit the self-defence justification.
To point out the illegalities in the current circumstances is not to wage diplomatic war, to risk a flight of employers, nor to condone tyrants or abandon the oppressed. As many commentators, in your paper among others, have pointed out, US corporations in Ireland are not motivated by diplomatic considerations.Employees have nothing to fear from an honest approach by the Irish government to proper legal conduct of international relations. To fail to lend support to the rule of international law when it most needs it is at best cowardice.
No one doubts that Saddam is an international criminal, but it should not surprise anybody that the US government would opt to bomb him given that it will not recognise the court to which he ought properly be brought, the International Criminal Court. What liberation is it to an oppressed people whose only apparent option is to be volunteered into another war without any guarantees as to their long-term future? Is Afghanistan the model they should look to?
More than 100,000 Irish people, and millions of others globally, marched against what they instinctively know this time to be a war of aggression. They are not appeasers of tyrants, nor indifferent to the suffering of the Iraqi people. They would no doubt welcome a genuine effort at enforcement of the ample textual law governing criminality, genocide, ethnocide, and the use of weapons of mass destruction, among other things. But there is a suspicion in the present situation that the distinction between Iraq's stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction and the intended use of a mass of ordinary weapons with mass destructive consequence is a false one. - Yours, etc.,
COLM FAHY, BA LLB LLM, PRO, Irish Society for International Law, Dalkey, Co Dublin.
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Madam, - You state in the editorial on the 24th of February that Mary Harney should know better. Well she does. The looney left has dictated the agenda in Ireland on the war with Iraq. MH was speaking for a large but silent part of the population, who will side with America against the enemies of the west. The Irish anti-war movement are using the war on Iraq to further there own agenda, which is the overthrow of the freemarket and the end of capitalism.
You are quite correct to say this State is a democracy and they are free to protest. However, that also gives Mary Harney and others the right to expose the protesters for what they really are; discredited idealists whose beliefs do not belong to the 21st century. Their views are redundant and morally bankrupt. I and many others congratulate Mary Harney for highlighting this. - Yours, etc.
JOHN KENNY, Sandford Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6
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Madam, - After having such a wonderful day at the march for peace in Dublin on Saturday, I am hugely relieved that I was not marching in Ruth Dudley Edwards's name. That would really worry me and I would have had to re-examine my stance. Thankfully, all present were, figuratively speaking, out of step with Ruth. - Yours, etc.,
Mrs MARY STEWART, Ardeskin, Donegal Town.
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Madam, - Your editorial ('Not in our name say marchers', February 17th) accuses me of dismissing the United Nations "as an irrelevant forum" in relation to the effort to halt an imminent attack on Iraq.
I most certainly do not say that the UN is irrelevant since those frantically building up the war machine sit on its Security Council. I, and the Socialist Party, do say, however, that we should have no illusion that it is in the Security Council that a catastrophic attack on the people of Iraq will be prevented.
You say that speakers at the magnificent anti-war rally in Dublin on Saturday reflected a dilemma "that many in Ireland will face if the Security Council does eventually endorse US action". A few speakers may face such a dilemma. Your own published opinion polls and the mood on the demonstration show,however, that a majority will have no such dilemma. And why not? Let us take the five permanent members of the Security Council.
The US and British Governments are the instigators of war. Should we be impressed if they are joined by the butchers of Tienamen Square who still rule in Beijing? If Mr Putin signs up should we be swayed by a man who meets the aspirations of ethnic and national minorities within the Russian Federation with the most brutal repression and the slaughter of civilians? And if Mr Chirac's right wing Government eventually comes on board Battleship Bush/Blair, should that carry persuasive moral force in view of that Government's extensive business dealings with the Saddam Hussein dictatorship.
To halt the rush to war we look to the millions who mobilised around the globe last Saturday. Never before has humanity spoken with such cohesion and moral force. And that is because they see that the reasons put forward for war are fraudulent.
Worried about dwindling oil reserves at home and that Saudi Arabia might fall to extreme fundamentalists in the next ten years, the US joined by Britain want their oil corporations to take a commanding hold of the Iraqi oil-fields and put themselves in a position to control the Middle East region. The war, therefore, is for old fashioned imperial domination and capitalist exploitation. This is exactly what caused the first World War, the second World War, and bloody wars in virtually every decade in the 20th Century.
The marching masses are saying that they do not wish to see repeated in the 21st Century the bloody slaughter visited on their forbears. Workers servicing the war machine at airports like Shannon and elsewhere in Europe could give concrete expression to that aspiration by withdrawing their labour from the war machine in 'blacking' and strike action. And if some jobs were threatened public investment should be put in until the situation stabilised.
Establishing permanent peace however, means removing the root cause of wars. This means snatching the earth's vital resources from the multinational exploiters and placing them in the democratic ownership and control of the majority. The resources criminally wasted on armaments should also be redirected to address and resolve the acute problems of our world which are at the root of so much conflict - poverty, hunger, disease and homelessness. This transformation of our world on the basis of the simple principles of democratic socialism would hit the armaments companies, the owners of the multinationals and the vile dictatorships which they prop up while all of humanity would gain. Yours,etc. -
JOE HIGGINS TD The Socialist Party, Dáil Éireann.