I refer to Oon Yeoh's Transitions

o­n Thursday, Feb 20.

Though in my previous letter ( Missed the point of the anti-war movement

) I explained clearly what is the principal aim of the anti-war movement, namely to influence and persuade governments not to launch a war o­n Iraq so as to prevent loss of innocent Iraqi civilian lives, he still asked this and then demonstrated his ingenuity by immediately posing a bunch of 'when-was-the-last-time-you-beat-your-wife' type of questions.

It would appear that these were designed to demonstrate the anti-US ideology of the peace movement.

Well, the anti-war movement is certainly anti an unjust war. It is not anti-US per se if o­ne bears in mind that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American citizens in the anti-war movement.

However, I would go as far as to say, yes, it is highly probable that it may well be anti-Bush administration (with perhaps the sole exception of Colin Powell). And I make no apologies for this.

As for the loony behaviour of some in the peace rallies, o­ne would have to recognise that there are always a lunatic few in any movement, but to cite these examples as representative of the peace movement is hardly objective journalism.

It is an unfair allegation and does disservice to the majority of peace-loving people throughout the world.

It is convenient to quote certain journalists whose opinions match Mr Oon's but that hardly justifies his pro-war belief is correct.

One can also easily quote journalists like Ted Rall ( Yahoo ) and Robert Fisk ( The Independent , UK), to name a few, to support the anti-war movement.

Again Mr Oon is attempting to obfuscate the intention of the peace movement by stating that they (including yours truly) cannot claim to represent the Iraqi people.

This is regrettably a tangential argument as no anti-war participant or supporter ever did claim to be so. Let me say this again, we want peace; we don't war so that innocent lives need not be lost.

Mr Oon then went o­n to describe the various victims of Saddam Hussein, as if these automatically merit an attack o­n Iraq.

May I ask then what is the war aim of the Bush administration? Is it about disarmament of Iraq? Or is it about human rights violations by that country?

The former has been dampened somewhat by the latest UN weapons inspector's report. If it is the latter, then what about countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Israel - to name just a few of America's allies? And I haven't gone into the past yet.

I do not believe any peace activist has supported Saddam or even believe that he is other than a brutal dictator.

Being anti-war does not mean being pro-Saddam. Now, wouldn't that just be plain Bush-speak as in "If you are not with us, you are against us".

And his analogy about the cop (meaning the US) and the two criminals, o­ne with the baseball bat (Iraq) and the other with the machine gun (North Korea) has him shooting his own foot.

Which cop will ignore a criminal with a submachine gun in order to attend to another with a stick, especially if the latter has been successfully contained for more than 10 years? O­nly Mr George W Bush, of course!

Why are we reluctant to question Saddam's legitimacy? I don't believe any peace activist is. Everyone knows him as the Butcher of Baghdad, as well as the former pal of the US. Why do we question the legitimacy of the US intended war?

We ask again, what is the war aim of the Bush administration in attacking Iraq?

Mr Oon took us back to World War II, where he reminded us that if not for the US, we would either be speaking German or Japanese. Well, aren't we spelling 'programme' as 'program' nowadays, and calling 'petrol' 'gasoline', and eating McDonald's and immersing ourselves in a host of other Stateside stuff?

Really, this line of discussion is absolutely puerile, and I apologise for even responding to it.

But o­n World War II again, may I remind Mr Oon when Nazi Germany overran Europe in 1939, and the Japanese massacred the Chinese in Nanking two years earlier, where was the US?

Don't think that the US participation in that war was solely altruistic. Remember Dec 7, 1941? The US o­nly came into the war after that fateful day.

Certainly everyone who was affected was grateful the US played the principal role of defeating the two aggressors. But should not that be the moral of the issue that a country should o­nly strike back in defence, and not launch pre-emptive strikes?

After all, the 'mother' of all pre-emptive strikes was the attack o­n Pearl Harbor, unless you want to include o­n a lower scale, the Israeli air strike in 1967 during the 6-day War.

One should not dish out the usual saying about 'we can't make a democratic omelette if we don't break a few innocent Iraqi civilian eggs', unless o­ne himself is the egg. There have been evil regimes that have imploded without any attack by external forces to institute 'regime change', as with the former white South African government, the Soviet Union, and Chile, to name a few.

A war brings great losses to the innocents, even long after the war. It has been estimated that after the 1991 Gulf War, more than a million Iraqis, mainly children, died of malnutrition and diseases over the years - in a country that o­nce had the best health system in the Middle East.

So millions of Afghan girls are delighted with their new schooling, thanks to the US? This is now a country where its president, Hamid Karzai, dares not venture beyond Kabul, and even within it, o­nly with the protection of heavily armed American Special Forces bodyguards.

The outer regions belong to the new US ally, the Afghan warlords, known collectively as the Northern Alliance, a pack of brutal murderers, looters, rapists, drug dealers and criminals. Hey, these were the guys who actually made the Taliban popular in the first place.

And speaking about the Taliban (and al-Qaeda), guess who was their best buddy during the Soviet-Afghanistan war, and who trained and armed them? Why, my dear chap, the good US of A!

Can Mr Oon and I just agree to disagree because by now, he and I know where the other stands.