Peace through strength

...all thanks to that massive industrial/military complex which constitutes America's unlimited might.

Reading Dr Charles Mercieca's singularly rancid opinion regarding the United States (The Sunday Times, September 29), harks back to those heady times when Malta's Socialist regime ran riot with its pathetic "neutrality" (read anti-American) bias in general, at the expense of kowtowing to Malta's "saviours" of the time, viz. Libya, China, Romania and North Korea, in the meantime distancing itself from the American "bogey" at the height of the cold war.

Similarly, Dr Mercieca's opinion (for all its worth) bristles with a strong anti-American stance which nowadays sounds as reactionary as it is blatantly and patently flawed.

His curtain-raiser regarding superpowers sounds just as pathetic as does neutrality now when the US (mercifully) emerges the cold war winner and (even more mercifully) the only superpower governed strictly by democratic rule.

One shudders to think what would have happened had America surrendered its industrial/military might to totalitarianism, the likes of the USSR's and China's. One even wonders what the rest of us would be doing now, or better still where would we all be (including your correspondent). Alas, Dr Mercieca seems to be totally unfamiliar with that literary indictment by George Orwell, 1984, just when, and concurrently, these nightmares were being enacted in Europe.

Furthermore, he pathetically expostulates his diatribe by lampooning America's industrial/military complex in imposing its policies on both domestic and foreign affairs. Of course, as the world's leader in industry, monopolised, unfettered and unrestricted, this same industrial potential is just as limitless as it is powerful. Indeed it is this harnessing of free enterprise and obviously its conversion to ballistic machinery which has been the utter force to arm-wrestle (and win) a centralised and "elitistic" communist lifestyle (and enslavement) despite its shortcomings (Utopia is for the birds, Dr Mercieca), and which has kept the free world from a descent into misery and horror, unless your correspondent suffers from a severe case of amnesia...

Maybe he conveniently forgets the aftermath of World War Two, when Europe and Japan lay in ruins (thanks to totalitarianism) while Communism made even deeper inroads into Europe and Asia. Oddly enough, he also seems forgetful of that gallant Allied airlift which converted military aircraft to transport, for 11 months in 1948-49, basic everyday needs to a beleaguered Berlin, thanks to Stalin's stranglehold of this city, but which America's mighty industrial/complex successfully staved.

Contrary to your correspondent's highly flawed premise that the US is continually establishing bases everywhere, "to take by force what it cannot take through legitimate politics," America only sends GIs to protect and beef up these same states (Afghanistan) when threatened from without (Al-Qaeda) or within (Taliban), etc...

And only when a clear and visible danger rears its ugly head and at the invitation of the governments concerned. Neither has America ever sold any fissionable (uranium, plutonium and so on) material, as Dr Mercieca maintains. The "nuclear club" (to which America also belongs) came into being by individual and technologically advanced member states harnessing their own nuclear weaponry.

One thanks God that the US, with its NATO and Pacific Rim allies, has successfully averted yet another global conflagration thanks to its military might and underscored by its Strategic Air Command's motto, "Peace through strength..."

Following Russia's collapse, Dr Mercieca asserts, it is now America's turn to bite the dust, "sooner than later." If this apocalyptic event does happen one trusts it will be much later than sooner. One shudders to think what will be left of democracy and the other inalienable human rights with the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein at large.

Dr Mercieca is an emeritus professor at Alabama's A&M University. Reading his totally muddled treatise on how the world should deal with the United States should qualify him for the Saddam Hussein Campus of ill-omen in downtown Baghdad.