THE EDITOR, Sir:RON GOOD, in your Letter of the Day (May 12), condemns as "utter hypocrisy" the current debate over alleged war crimes by United States soldiers in Iraq, without realising that his own flawed reasoning lands him in the very category he finds so disturbing.
The proposition that war under any circumstances is unjustifiable is as much without merit as Good's claim that those who support war cannot now complain about the conduct of individuals during war, however egregious.
In making this assertion, Mr. Good falls prey to the very irrational thinking he rails against so vehemently. If war cannot be justified under any circumstances, then neither can we justify the state's use of force to guarantee the individual rights of its own citizens.
How different, in principle, is the use of force by, say, the Jamaican police against criminal elements in our society, and the use of force by one country or the international community in situations where sustained aggression is perpetrated against other nations and/or their own citizens?
Clearly, Mr. Good's extreme pacifism could not rationally be an option here, anymore than it could have been an option to Churchill and the rest of the free world during the relentless march of Nazism across Europe.
And more to the point on Mr. Good's charge of hypocrisy: those of us who believe in the moral goodness of President Bush's actions in bringing relief to Saddam's oppressed citizens and his wronged neighbours, are also compelled by the same moral principles to condemn the equally unspeakable and inhumane actions of U.S. soldiers against Iraqi prisoners.
It is with no less "outrage and moral indignation" to borrow Good's phrase, that we find it baffling, hypocritical even, that such clear and simple logic escapes the goodly gentleman's "rational" mind!
I am, etc
NORD KELLY
Kingston 3
