"New Zealand's defence against terrorism is the simple fact that we tend not to go around dropping bombs on other countries or supporting sanctions that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and then calling it collateral damage.
If we kept to this defence strategy we wouldn't be supporting the Bush administration in its arrogant, warmongering efforts."
The New Zealand Herald, September 29-30, 2001
LETTERS TO EDITOR
Is Armageddon spelled Afghanistan?
G.P., Beach Heaven
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When President Bush screams for an eye for an eye, using logic from Old Testament times rather than modern Christian teaching, he is not only seeking the unleash vast military might but is giving global freedom to the most virulent and destructive force this planet has seen.
R.M., Pukekohe
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Two weeks after the terrorist attacks, the death toll approaches 7000. Meantime, 60,0000 children have died from malnutrition or preventable disease. How many battleships is America sending to help the 60,0000 who will die in the next fortnight?
A.C., Manurewa
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This will never happened if Bill, Hillary and Monica were still in the White House.
B.P, Freemans Bay
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Could President Bush's refusal to allow the United Natins to place a peacekeeping force in Israel have been a fatal blunder?
W. H., Heme Bay
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Response to attacks
Nuclear bombs were not dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in order to "save lives" or to bring the war to an end, as your correspondent Max Astwood suggests.
This myth - so comforting to many - has been long discredited. In 1990 the chief historian for the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, J. Samuel Walker, recorded the view of most scholars that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan or the end the war.
President Truman records in his papers that the Japanese had already put out serious peace feelers. He was also emphatic that the clear indications that the Soviet Union was about to enter the war against Japan would have led inevitably to a Japanese surrender.
There is an old saying "the first casualty of war is truth". Now as war clouds gather, it is distressing to note the level of antagonism levelled at those who want to consider why there is such anger in the Middle East towards the US.
New Zealand should not be offering troops, but urging restraint and search for a fairer world order, instead of blind retribution with its inevitable consequence - ongoing massacres of the innocent.
Maire Leadbeater, Grey Lynn
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While watching the events of the past few months unfold on the world stage, it occurred to me that the problem is not that our technology is so advanced but that our spirituality is so primitive.
A.H., Titirangi
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Garh George's claim about history throwing up leaders, and George W. Bush "being open to God's promptings", stands in stark contrast to his dismissal of Islam as "medieval religion, a mindset of hatred, primitive treatment and regard for women, fanaticism, suicide, all mixed together with modern technology".
There is nothing more medieval than the idea that God will intervene directly in the affairs of anyone, especially the President of the United States. If God sees fit to interact with the world, I fear that he should have done it on September 11, and caused the minds of the hijackers to see the truth: that killing yourself and untold thousands of others is no way to perform God's work.
I do not see God's hand here, or indeed anywhere. If God exists He has abandoned His world to us humans, and it is up to us to make of it what we can.
Bush sees that it is his hand, along with the hands of all who cried over the atrocity committed in New York and Washington that might now remake a better world for all, regardless of what colour their skin. Or which God or creed they happen to worship.
Nick Pullar, Chemlsford, England
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Revenge best cold
The Herald correspondents and peace activists around the world who oppose military retaliations from the US against Arab terrorists miss the plot.
Eddie and Bill Gloyne suggests America should drop video players and cassettes of people talking about peace into Afghanistan, even though the general populace has no electric to plug the video players into.
New Zealand's anti-US factions, including Green MP Keith Locke and Disarmament Minister Matt Robson, want America to respond by thinking about their policies.
British ant-globalisation groups plan on using a campaign for peace as camouflage for their anti-capitalist and anti-US beliefs.
The point the above people all miss is that America must kill all the Muslim terrorists or else more Americans, New Zealanders and Britons will die. Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather explains that if you let someone who committed an act of treachery against you off the hook, they will always remain a danger to you. I have no problem with America taking so long to retaliate: as The Godfather says, "Revenge is a dish that tastes best cold".
Stephen Morris, Te Atatu South
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Sunday Star-Times
September 30, 2001
Opinions & Letters
SIGN PLEASE: The Rome statute of the International Criminal Court, a United Nations initiative which proposes a permanent international criminal court to deal with terrorists, needs 60 countries to ratify the document before the court can be set up. At present, although there are 139 signatories, only 38 have ratified the statute. The United States, which has set out on an anti-terrorism crusade, is not one of these.
If the US is serious about fighting terrorism, the first step is setting up an international criminal court. So why has the US not ratified the Rome statute? Are its politicians frightened that at some future date its own military or political leaders could be facing crime against humanity?
Dee Pigneguy, North Shore
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EYE FOR EYE: I don't have the answer, but didn't Gandhi say: "An eye for an eye makes all the world blind"
Vel Pasco, Mt Maunganui
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SIMPLE DEFENCE: "Where's our defence against terrorism?" read your letters' headline (September 23). New Zealand's defence against terrorism is the simple fact that we tend not to go around dropping bombs on other countries or supporting sanctions that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and then calling it collateral damage.
If we kept to this defence strategy we wouldn't be supporting the Bush administration in its arrogant, warmongering efforts.
Christian Briggs, Napier
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EVIL EMPIRES: In the Great War (1914 - 18) the French peasants whose villages were reduced to rubble and whose fields became a pattern of interlinking shell holes swarming with corpse-fed rats, referred to the English soldiers supposedly engaged in "liberating" them as "Les autres Boches" - the other Huns.
To an involved peasant one damned soldier is just like another. So it is with empires. If any good at all can possible come from this horrible affair, it may be that the American political and military establishment could wake up to the fact that to many small nations they are not the knight in shining armour who delivered them from the dragon but just "the other evil empire". And they don't register as less evil for being, for a while, the only empire left.
Christopher Dunne, North Shore
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OIL'S THE ANSWER: Most United States citizens are puzzled by the unfriendly attitude of many mid-eastern people. This perplexing puzzle is a three-letter word beginning with "O" and ending in "L". Hopefully one day some of their children may solve the puzzle and tell the adults.
G M Spooner, Hastings
