Terry Roper (September 12) does not like anti-warmongers making their case publicly in Bonn Square using a megaphone. So he insults them quite gratuitously by suggesting that they support public executions etc.

But there is a serious question to be asked: why does Nato and the West always react in the way that is calculated to cause the most pain and suffering to the ordinary people of the Middle East and play into the hands of groups like IS?

The BBC tells us that there are 30-40,000 IS activists (in contrast to under 1,000 in Bin Laden’s “army”). Concerted Nato bombing might kill 10 per cent of them but will slaughter many more innocent locals who happen to be in the wrong place.

If locals are interviewed, they complain, “where was the West when IS was beheading our kith and kin?” and “Why do you only react when a Westerner is executed?”

Today’s letters

Even if Nato is able to wipe out IS, that will not be the end of the story. That cannot happen until the West addresses the underlying problems of the Middle East, i.e. its habit of propping up reactionary oil-rich regimes, in particular Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; ending the bleeding dry of Iraq’s economy by US multinationals and preventing Israel from pursuing its neo-colonial policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

Otherwise a successor to IS will emerge that will count its activists in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

Jonathan Saunders

Ramsay Road

Oxford

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