dogs don't feel shame

  1. 228 Posts.
    Shame of Hue and Falluja

    Wednesday November 10, 2004
    The Guardian

    Do US troops really regard the disaster at Hue and the slaughter that followed (Go kick some butt and make history, Vietnam-style, US troops urged, November 9) with anything but shame?
    We nearly all now see Hue as the beginning of the end of US involvement in Vietnam. I expect to see Falluja as the beginning of the end of the involvement in Iraq of US and UK forces. It will not survive the slaughter we are about to witness.

    I feel intense shame that my country is instrumental in this slaughter, and for the first time will think twice before contributing to British Legion charities as we come up to Remembrance Sunday. I do not want to watch Tony Blair laying a wreath in my name. It is an insult to the glorious dead.
    Christopher Leadbeater
    Ashford, Kent


    Your editorial (Fearful in Falluja, November 9) rightly expresses alarm at the Iraqi provisional government using emergency powers, "like so many other Arab regimes, that would have been normal in the bad old Ba'athist days". Perhaps Ayad Allawi is taking a leaf out of our own government's book: it too, alone among western European countries, has been using special powers under a "state of emergency" declared after 9/11 to send foreigners to prison without charge or trial, purely on the basis of what the home secretary thinks they might do.It is a blatant fiction designed to relieve the government of its human rights obligation under national and international law to allow those whom it imprisons to have a fair trial.


    If the law lords in their forthcoming decision fail to overturn it, there will be an urgent need for parliament to do so. What a disgraceful example for the nation of Magna Carta to set to the world, including Iraq and "many other Arab regimes"!
    Brian Barder
    (Diplomatic Service 1965-94), London


    Madeleine Bunting (Silent screams, November 8) asserts that attacks on cities and increased ratios of civilian casualties are a 20th century phenomenon, due to aerial warfare. However, the 30 years' war in Germany in the 17th century involved numerous city sieges and sackings and resulted in the deaths of 25-30% of the civil population. Moreover, it is usually insurrectionary or defending forces who choose to fight in cities, which offer strategic, tactical and logistical advantages - especially with the advent of aerial power. If the Iraqi militants were in the desert, they would have supply difficulties as well as being vulnerable to US armoured and air forces. It is the militarily weak who choose to fight in cities, be it in Dublin 1916, Calais 1940 or Grozny in the 1990s.
    Alexander Woodward
    Chartham, Kent


    When I read the words of the amir in Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's brave report (We are not here to liberate Iraq, etc, November 9) about how he sometimes cries when he executes opponents, I was transported back 31 years to the Bronx in New York.

    Then I interviewed a grey-haired, sleepy-eyed gentleman who was head of fundraising through Noraid for the IRA. He was telling tales of fighting the Black and Tans before Irish independence. Trying to derail his romantic view of those times, I asked: "But didn't Christ say love your brother?"

    He angrily shouted: "I never killed a British soldier without praying that their soul went to heaven."

    Then he want back to raising money for arms and worshipping his god.
    Alasdair Buchan
    Diplomat magazine


    Good move capturing the hospital first. Now we shan't see kids with their limbs blown off on our screens.
    Peter Rowland
    London

 
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