Letters

Delshad needs to check his facts

Jonathan Delshad’s Monday submission, “Preemptive
action is both valid, necessary against Iraq,” is fraught
with several questionable assumptions. But by far the worst part of
the article is the author’s horribly false statement about
civilian casualties resulting from bombings of Afghanistan.

Delshad claims that “the innocent people killed in the war
against Afghanistan did not come to one hundredth of those killed
in the World Trade Center bombings.” If this were true that
would mean that the number of innocent Afghans killed by our
bombings numbered less than 29 people. All serious estimates of
civilian casualties are well above a thousand. Professor Marc
Herold from the University of New Hampshire meticulously estimated
the civilian deaths from October 2001 to March 2002 to be between
3,000 and 3,400.

A May 20 article by the United Kingdom’s Guardian
newspaper indicated that the total may be as high as 8,000 and that
“as many as 20,000 Afghans may have died as an indirect
consequence of the U.S. military intervention.” Even if all
these numbers were remarkably off, I don’t see how Mr.
Delshad could have forgotten about the only civilian casualties
that got significant press coverage ““ the errant bombing of
an Afghan wedding party in early July which killed at least 40
people. Such a massive error on the author’s part steals any
credibility from the rest of his arguments.

I am also shocked that the Daily Bruin Editorial Staff allowed
such a gross misstatement to be published. Still, my disappointment
on this issue is really directed at the entire mass media for
basically ignoring what seems to be a very critical matter ““
the loss of innocent lives. If a more accurate depiction of the
horrors and consequences of war was presented to the public,
perhaps we would be less eager to allow our leaders to use violence
as a means of solving political disputes.
Eric Tang
Third-year, Political science

Longshoremen image inaccurate

I found a number of problems with Monday’s editorial
“Dockworkers justified, Taft-Hartley biased” concerning
the current shutdown of major West Coast ports.

Although I respect your concern for the
“blue-collar” longshoremen and their interests, the
editorial naively and unjustifiably blames Bush for “whining
about the national economy.” The longshoremen are not simply
poor, struggling “blue collar” workers but are, in
fact, well-paid. Their union salaries far exceed many “white
collar” salaries which makes your portrayal of them clearly
misleading and inaccurate.

Also, the claim that their demands are “mundane”
misses the fact the workers are impeding the modernization of the
ports. They legally cannot be allowed to force new workers to
unionize and the means they are pursuing are seriously harming the
state as well as the national economy. $1 billion a day is not a
“mundane” method of negotiation. There are many Bush
policies I disagree with, but blaming him for a labor dispute (that
has nothing to do with corporate greed or disregard for blue-collar
workers) and an attempt to stop the bleeding of our state’s
economy is an unfair characterization of the situation.
John Ly
Fourth-year, History