Letters to the Editor

Andrew Coley from Prospect, SA

THE rise in human rights abuses around the globe since the media and coalition countries became obsessed with the debacle in Iraq has now been confirmed by Amnesty International (“Rights worst in 50 years”, 27/5).

Mmmm …50 years. Wouldn’t that include the communists killing something like a 100 million of their own citizens. Never mind..small detail.

we need to encourage nations to develop their own sense of democracy and security through international aid in areas such as trade, health and education

I agree with Andrew that international aid in areas such as trade, health and education is agreat idea and one that should be pursued after the West can develop the circumstances where aid will make a difference. Bush could have chosen not to go to war and give Saddam say, US$500 million aid to build schools and health centres. The fact that all the schools and health centres Saddam would’ve built with the aid looked remarkedly like palaces and the playground equipment like tanks and missiles wouldn’t have worried Andrew. And even if some of the change was spent on schools, they would be Schools of Hate with Clerics inciting mayhem and murder. We could have also given the Taliban aid but I think they would have given it to Osama who would have sent it back to the US in a missile loaded with 10,000 gallons of aviation fuel. Straight back to the Whitehouse Still, good idea Andrew. As US troops invaded the heartland of the AL Queda in Afghanistan I argued then that they should, amongst a whole lot of other things, secure Kabul, set up schools, let girls in and start educating the whole population. Sorry Andrew, but your faith in human kindness is not a subject in Iraq or Afghanistan seats of learning. Still, the Editor of the Australian thinks it’s good enough to print. Makes me wonder if any of these people have ever had to make a plan work. On the same page Christian Leavesly from Carlton Vic points out that;

Human rights have been fought for and won the hard way over hundreds of years. They did not spring up overnight, and their existence is proof of their necessity.

One part of history where human rights were won the hard way was during World War Two and I can promise Christian that the human rights he talks about were not uppermost in the minds of Roosevelt, Churchill, Menzies or Curtain. If a enemy POW had info that was important to the war cause then he was interrogated until he coughed up. WW2, for the younger set, was when the US gave thousands of their sons to provide a safer world where Human Rights lawyers could call them evil and not be beheaded. I like the line from Secretary Powell recently when argueing that the US were not colonising the Middle East when he suggested that the…only land we have ever kept after any invasion was a small plot for our dead. Otherwise they went home after peace had been established. Could I also mention the Marshal Plan that rebuilt Europe and the efforts that went into demilitiarising Japan. Nah. Not Anti-American enough.