Superpower justifies warmongering on basis of threats from a few armed peasants

JIM FORDE (Letters, January 25) is naive to believe US troops will withdraw from Iraq in a year – they have been saying that ever since the invasion seven years ago.

The puppet governments in Iraq and Afghanistan could not survive without the support of US and British troops and covert operations. Mr Forde claims civil war would be a consequence of withdrawal. He must be the only person on the planet not to have heard of the numerous bomb attacks in which tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. The US invasion in 1993 precipitated civil war. The Kabul government has never ruled autonomous tribal areas in Afghanistan. The US was happy enough to bankroll and supply arms to the Taliban when they were fighting the Russians.

These people have every right to defend their homeland against alien invaders.

Whereas the invasion of Iraq to steal their oil was justified by a series of lies, weapons of mass destruction, involvement in 9/11 and regime change, no one really knows what the US is doing in Afghanistan. Either it was to protect the now cancelled oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea or it is just part of their quest for world domination.

Nine years on, men are still being held in the Guantanamo Gulag without charge, labelled illegal combatants and located outside the US to circumvent the law. The US is still wiping out whole villages using intelligence based on torture and bribery by the cowardly use of unmanned drones, then claiming to a gullible media that the inhabitants were terrorists.

Despite being a military power equivalent to all the other world’s powers put together (the US is responsible for 47% of world armament expenditure), they try to justify their blitzkriegs and warmongering with the ludicrous claim that they are threatened by a few armed peasants.

Terrorism is the inevitable reaction to all the injustice, subjugation and oppression and cannot be overcome by more of the same medicine, only by removing the cause.

Michael Job

Rossnagrena

Glengarriff

Co Cork