SNP ministers and other Yes campaigners rarely miss an opportunity to slip the terms "foreign wars" and "illegal wars" into their interminable anti-UK diatribes.
They should be more specific. Are they referring to the war that ousted psychotic, terrorist-hosting Islamists (Afghanistan) or the one that ended the reign of a sadistic, genocidal despot (Iraq)?
Or perhaps they have in mind the supposedly-illegal 1999 bombing of Serbia - action denounced, at the time, as "unpardonable folly" by Alex Salmond, but which cut short Slobodan Milosovic's campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide?
They might also wish to reflect that the Second World War was a "foreign war" (we could have ignored the Nazi invasion of Poland) and that the assassination of Adolf Hitler would have been illegal.
Today, the legality of military intervention is decided by a show of hands at the UN Security Council. Two of those hands belong to Russia and China - both undemocratic regimes notorious for locking up and killing political opponents.
Further, illegality is not synonymous with immorality (nor legality with morality). UN sanctions that left Saddam Hussein in power, whilst annually killing 100,000 innocent Iraqis, were perfectly legal.
Worse, it is just as legal (and entirely consistent with nationalist insularity) simply to ignore regimes that oppress, torture, gas and starve the innocent.
If the points made above cannot be answered, then the "foreign/illegal wars" soundbites might just have to be dropped.
Keith Gilmour,
0/1, 18 Netherton Gardens,
Netherton Gate,
Glasgow.
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