Sunday, 27 December 2009

We have a habit of putting our boots and our values where they’re not wanted. Afghanistan is more likely to find security and prosperity if we work quietly from the inside out rather than brazenly from the outside in.

Crawford Logan

Stirling

Karzai and our role

Sayed Salahuddinin’s report from Kabul highlights the essential role President Karzai plays in the ­occupation of Afghanistan (Afghan cabinet retains ministers favoured by the West, News, December 20). He serves his masters in Washington and London occupying Afghanistan militarily on the one hand, and beholden to ethnic and tribal warlords for local influence on the other.

Corruption is a very strong charge, inferring as it does accusations of fraudulence, double dealing, financial and political skullduggery. Yet in describing the regime of Hamid Karzai, it does not sufficiently describe the day-to-day reality on the ground for ordinary Afghans. Their circumstances are so dreadful as winter sets in that one is almost tempted to suggest their response to his recent cabinet appointments will be: “So what, under US and British instructions he appointed 60% of the entire Afghan Parliament.”

It is no wonder that 70% of the British population want Gordon Brown to withdraw our troops.

Colin Fox

National Spokesman,

Scottish Socialist Party

STUC acted in good faith

Your report questions the validity of the STUC-commissioned report Sectarianism And The Workplace (Author of sectarian study is member of pro-IRA fanzine, News, December 13). It does so on the basis that a researcher employed on the project subsequently became involved with a pro-Irish Republican website.

Working with our funding partners the Scottish Government and Sense Over Sectarianism, the STUC tendered for this work in 2005. The contract was awarded in good faith to Professors Andrew Johnson and Gerry Finn, in the Department of Education, Strathclyde University: one of Scotland’s premier academic institutions. It is disappointing that these key facts about the report’s provenance were omitted from your report.

If the Sunday Herald believes that this matter is worth pursuing then perhaps it should take it up with Strathclyde University.

Grahame Smith

General Secretary

Scottish Trades Union Congress

Israel has responsibilities

In the view of Alexander McKay, I stand accused of conducting a “diatribe” and of “breathtaking prejudice” (Israel-Palestine issue two-sided, Letters, December 13). In the case of the former, and in the correct sense of the word, I agree. However, if Mr McKay had taken the effort to address my criticisms of the state of Israel he would have realised the crass nature of the latter.

And I could not agree more with his contention that Israel “should be accountable for any proven atrocity”, the list, of which, gets longer by the month. The further contention that Israel is “a bastion of real democracy” seems, in Mr McKay’s eyes, to absolve it of all responsibility for acting in a legal, civilised, humane manner towards the Palestinian people.

Hugh Humphries

Secretary, Scottish Friends of Palestine

Defining the noughties: readers’ picks

We asked you to identify the pivotal moments of the new millennium’s first decade. Here is a selection of your contributions

The defining moment of the first decade of the 21st Century was the night when bombs rained down on the innocent people of Iraq. To our eternal shame, those bombs were UK bombs, ordered by a UK prime minister, paid for by UK taxpayers. In cold daylight, the scenes of carnage were indeed shocking and awful; parents frantically tearing at the rubble of their homes, screaming for their children; toddlers huddled round the bodies of their dead parents.

The defining moment of the next 10 years will be when justice prevails, and Tony Blair stands in the dock to answer charges of lying to members of Parliament, and the people they represent, and of ordering the illegal invasion and bombing of a country which posed no threat to the UK, and which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and claimed the lives of our young soldiers, sent into battle on a lie.

Ruth Marr

Stirling

We are facing not just the end of a decade, but the end of an era. That era started in the post-war period, was briefly interrupted in the 1970s, but took hold again with a vengeance in the 1980s and 1990s and reached its nadir in the noughties. During that long period, we were led to believe that our corporate emperors were dressed in the finest robes and that those robes were all of their own making. But this year’s banking crisis proved that the corporate world was naked all along.

The world’s success gurus, meanwhile, were equally culpable and none of them shouted: “Naked!” Instead, they held up these lucksters as role models and used them to sell their books and corporate training programmes: “Yes, you too can be Sir Fred Goodwin, just follow these simple steps and adopt these habits.”

Simplistic American success philosophy has had its day, and that day coincided with America’s 20th-century economic dominance. It was this economic dominance that made America, not the other way about. That’s the new paradigm and it’s one that America and the West are now grappling with -- economic history and geography are now moving against them, where previously it moved for them.

Dominic Quigley

Motherwell

We all thought that the obscene carnage of the 20th century was past and that we could move forward at the new millennium, but the past decade has proved that we, as a nation, have not changed. The baggage of our flawed democracy is plain. The superfluous royal family continue without justification. The indefensible and undemocratic House of Lords remains. The House of Commons lacks the basis of integrity or common sense as exposed in the expenses scandal. Our history shows we are a warfare state. After Bosnia, Blair and Bush waged an illegal war in Iraq. The Faslane base houses our weapons of mass destruction. Our panacea is more armaments.

The decade concludes with the senseless loss of soldiers’ lives, and no vision of how to do better.

J Muir

Glasgow

Two events summed up the decade: firstly, Tony Blair lying to parliament about reasons to enter into a war with Iraq and the gullible/ingenuous/sycophantic MPs voting in his favour; secondly, the marriage of Prince Charles to Camilla Parker Bowles. Both represented the triumph of spin over honesty. Tony Blair has since admitted that he was determined to take Britain into war, despite there being no legal or ethical grounds for doing so and Prince Charles first broke his marriage vows by continuing an adulterous affair with Mrs Parker Bowles, then following the death of his wife made public his view that his mistress was a “non-negotionable” part of his life, denied that he’d marry her and that she’d ever become his queen.

This decade, then, has been tainted by lying and bullying and made possible by its pre-requisites: cowardice, sycophancy and greed.

Lovina S Roe

Perth

Here’s an irony. New Labour, that changeling child of Thatcherism, will finish the first decade of the 21st century by bequeathing us a “peace envoy to the Middle East”. This is the very same man who at the start of the decade, told lies about wepons of mass destruction,invaded Iraq and connived in a “war on terror” which is bringing untold suffering and the curtailment of liberty to thousands.

While 10s of thousands demonstrated against Prime Minister Blair in Glasgow and across the globe, he seemed unaware that if he wanted to find weapons of mass destruction, he need only have asked. If it helps him in the next decade, please tell the “peace envoy to the Middle East” that we know where they are kept. It’s called Faslane, one of the terrifying abominations on our Scottish soil.

  Donald Mackinnon

Glasgow

The defining moment of the decade was the Twin Towers atrocity, New York.

  Michael Hamilton

Kelso