It would be disingenuous of any sensible person not to agree with much of what is said by Mr Paul Ouimette ( Countermyths about US-led war o­n Iraq ). He is right in his contention that all arrows pointed to an al-Qaedaish Afghanistan based organisation however loose being involved in 9/11.

He is also right to point out that the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are more the creation of the Pakistani ISI than the US CIA. Furthermore, he is spot o­n about oppression by despotic Islamic leaders in the Middle East and that Muslims (over the centuries) have suffered more from their fellow Muslims than non-Muslims.

It is also true that the throwing up of a common enemy of an ostensible Judeo-Christian anti-Islamic conspiracy does provide much cover for wicked Muslim leaders.

So, it is apt for him to conclude that in "short, (Muslims) need to do some really deep soul-searching instead of looking for external conspiracies behind every failure in the Muslim world".

Be that as it may, Mr Ouimette must himself engage in some "deep soul-searching" of his own and admit that the world would have been a much better place had the US not embarked o­n this pre-emptive and precipitous action against Iraq which is accepted as being contrary to international law by many civilised nations and the UN secretary-general himself - and if the US had acted all long in tune with its intrinsically decent conscience rather than at the behest of the enormously powerful Jewish lobby in dealing with Israeli intransigence and injustice in Palestine over the last half a century.