Letter: War is always nasty

Sir: The attack on a convoy of Albanian Kosovar refugees is a tragedy in two senses. The most immediate tragedy is that a large number of non-combatants have been slaughtered by the US military, but beneath the surface lies another, darker and deeper tragedy - that the US public sees this attack as an aberration, and that the US media largely reports it as such. The historical record of US "interventions" shows a pattern of massive and often indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.

In the war against Vietnam hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered by US forces; the 1989 invasion of Panama resulted in the deaths of 3,000 civilians; during and after the war against Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were (and are being) killed by the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure coupled with the US sanctions against Iraq.

These crimes are being committed in our name, so if we are really concerned about the deaths of innocent people we should be opposing the policies of any government which facilitates them. Failure to do so makes us all guilty of war crimes.

MARK A LUNT

Irvington, New York, USA