Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey: Reply to David McDougall

Dear David,

Thank you for so freely expressing your opinion, which is your birthright, at least here in the Russian Press.

I fully understand how distressing it must be to be faced with the facts as to what your regime has been doing overseas and wonder whether you are getting the full and horrific facts in your newspapers.

Nobody likes to be confronted with the fact that their government lied to the people, to the nation, to the world, that it forged documents and invented stories, sending Colin Powell to the UN building to lie through his teeth, complete with maquettes and models of supposed WMD, which they fully
knew never existed.

Nobody likes to be confronted with the fact that their armed forces committed the most horrendous act of butchery seen anywhere since the time of Pol Pot, slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, machine-gunning cars packed with screaming women and kids, dropping DU and cluster bombs in
civilian areas, mutilating tens of thousands of others, taking the arms and legs and eyes and futures of thousands of kids away from them as they targeted civilian infrastructures and then doled out contracts without tender.

Nobody likes to see a substantial number of their armed forces involved in systematic acts of torture of unarmed and defenceless detainees.

This is what I have against the United States of America, nothing more and nothing less. And it is summarised in the evil regime controlled by George Bush, the man who takes God's name in vain because he is a manipulative, conniving political animal who knows very well what he is doing. He plays the game very well and fools nobody who knows what and who he really is. He is a Politician.

He has cost his country three million jobs, he has cost his workers two hundred thousand million of their hard-earned dollars. Personally, what he does in his own country is none of my business, but it is yours. However, what he does abroad is certainly my business and that of everyone else.

I cannot see a big difference between torturing prisoners at Treblinka and torturing prisoners at Abu Graib. Or are Iraqis to be considered inferior citizens because they have moustaches and are brown? I cannot see a big difference between putting Jews is the gas oven and opening up with a machine-gun against a three-year-old boy. Or is the boy a lesser human being because his parents are Arabs? I cannot see the difference between putting bodies in ovens to be burned and piling the bodies of civilians into ditches. Or are these citizens supposed to have less rights because they come from a developing country?

Mass graves? Torture? Murder? By Saddam or by the United States of America's armed forces??

The difference is in the scale. Give Bush and his regime a free hand and another four years and then write to this space again four years hence. I am certain the balance will not be so different.

Oh and another thing, let us sort out this Second World War nonsense once and for all. The United States entered the first and second world wars years after they started for one good reason: because it satisfied Washington's of Nazi soldiers
killed were engaged with Americans. Over 90% died on the Eastern Front, where Russia gave the lives of 20 million people to free Europe. What your side did in comparison pales into insignificance.

As regards British feelings towards the Americans, the soldiers used to complain they were the three "overs": "overpaid, oversexed and over here".

They were regarded as a bunch of ill-disciplined butchers by the generation of British people who saw their sons off to war in Europe, to be treated as second-class citizens by the arrogance of the US armed forces.

No, they were not welcome neither were they popular.