Pretext for war has been discredited

THE revelation last Thursday

Mon, 02 Jun, 2003 - 01:00

Donald Rumsfeld that the allies are unlikely to find any weapons of mass destruction calls into question the integrity of the leaders of the US and Britain, who insisted all along that such weapons existed and that their “intelligence sources” could confirm this as well as being apparently able to pinpoint their actual position.

Regime change was never the initial objective and was not the reason that such huge divisions opened up within the UN Security Council.

This latest admission raises the appropriateness of charging those responsible with war crimes given that the pretext for war has been discredited and that a considerable number of casualties resulted.

We know, of course, this will not happen: in western morality, war crimes are only perpetrated by those on the losing side. How the west, in particular the US and Britain, can claim to occupy the high moral ground in world affairs is breathtakingly inaccurate and arrogant.

D H Roberts,

Gloundine,

Castlegrove,

Mallow,

Co Cork.