Letters: The guilty politicians stay safe while the innocents are slaughtered

The former political leaders George W Bush and Tony Blair and their submissive cohorts, the real guilty parties personally responsible for this appalling situation, are now comfortably retired and out of public sight. But the result of their disastrous mistakes continue to be felt in the Middle East and across Europe, and there will be a damning historic judgement. The final result of their political folly is the streets of Britain becoming a military security area, with armed police and troops at every corner.

The ultimate ironic tragedy is that this week’s victims in the Manchester pop concert massacre were almost all teenage children, who were not even born when the military invasions took place and could not be in any way responsible for the today’s parlous situation. As always, it is the innocent who suffer.

Iain AD Mann,

7 Kelvin Court, Glasgow.

SO the stock response to Jeremy Corbyn's speech is that although the French and the Swedes were against the invasion of Iraq they get hit by terrorists too, leading to the conclusion that the link between the central theme of our defence policy, constant expeditionary warfare in the Middle East, is really not a contributor to our insecurity.

In my view the first iteration of the underpinnings of a refutation of this false proposition was put together by a research project run under the auspices of the United States Airforce University. It was put together over a decade ago and presented in the book Dying to Win written by Dr Robert Pape.

The study incorporated a huge sociological scoping exercise, that only the US military, I suppose, could afford to run. It looked into the background and motivations of hundreds of suicide bombers and drew some interesting conclusions. Key amongst them is the point that extremists have and always will be amongst us, here in the west in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Crucially though, very few ordinary people in the lands of the extremists listened to the extremists. Then something happened to the populations who were not listening to the extremists. We invaded them, resulting in a significant uptick in extremist recruitment.

This resulted in a significant upturn in the recruitment of the extremist groups, who positioned themselves as the defenders against the invaders .Then we got out when we discovered that when we were up against such determined fighters we were asymmetric war losers.

But we couldn't let go and replaced a ground war with a much more sustainable (read media-manageable) air war. According to the website airwars, we in the West have dropped more than 76,000 pieces of ordnance flown in mopre than 21,000 sorties over Iraq, Syria and Libya. The killing and therefore the recruitment to extremist organisations goes on.

Then we killed civilians by mistake. Not surprisingly, recruitment of enraged ordinary folk who can no longer think straight to the extremist organisations went through the roof and has remained there ever since.

In my view what this means (and I have no certainty but I can see no reason at all not to try it) that we must stop the bombing. Of course the terrorism won’t stop. Only an idiot could conclude that, but over time, possibly over a painfully long time, the extremist recruitment will lessen - to an extent that a tipping point might be reached, when, maybe years after we stop bombing the ordinary people in these countries anger lessens and they distance themselves from the extremists. Then, after even more time, the ordinary folk turn against the extremists as they used to do, before we invaded then and bombed them.

When it comes down to it the core security the world over, is not national, that's for the elites who run the wars and often profit from them. The security of the family shared by families in Manchester and in every other city on the planet is the core issue at stake here. Focus on the security of ordinary folk the world over and we just might have a solution.

Bill Ramsay,

84 Albert Avenue, Glasgow.

JEREMY Corbyn has a misguided mindset when it comes to terrorism (“Family of bomber say attack was ‘revenge for acts of West”, The Herald, May 26). Terrorism is worldwide. There are incidents in so many countries that have absolutely nothing to do with British foreign policy but everything to do with a hard line Islamist viewpoint stretching far back in history.

Most terrorism in the world right now is just a continuation of this classic struggle of Islamic versus non-Islamic societies as promulgated currently by a small but dangerous band of people. British foreign policy seeks to protect us from this. It may be imperfect but what Mr Corbyn is offering is abject surrender and will not achieve his laudable aim of world peace, but actually threaten it.

Dr Gerald Edwards,

Broom Road, Glasgow.

WELL said, Christine Grahame (Letters, May 25). I thought that the BBC news reporting from Manchester was appalling. George Alagiah almost elbowed the public out of the way to present the evening news. Why do we need an anchor in the middle of grief, leading to other reports also on the scene when it can be easily done (and without technical breaks) from the studio? It just appears that the news outlets have lowered themselves to the lowest common denominator.

Steve Barnet,

Broom Park, Gargunnock.

NOW that we have armed police and the military to protect us, could we further consider allowing private individuals to carry arms, as in the United States?

The licensing and training would have to be of the best, but terrorists – who are cowards - might think twice before attacking individuals if they know we can fight back.

Malcolm Parkin,

Gamekeepers Road, Kinnesswood, Kinross.