ARMS FOR OBLIVION
SIR,—Thank you for your article under the title 'Arms for Oblivion.' The case you make against supplying arms for Iraq is overwhelming. Could you not now continue your argument from the particular to the general? Has any good ever come out of the more forward nations arming the more backward? No doubt it is a practice hallowed by time. Very likely the Cro-Magnons supplied the Neanderthal man with flint arrow-heads. 'A traditional trade,' Mr. Profumo might say. But that doesn't make it right or even expedient. Leaving aside the ethical question : how often have the arms supplied been turned against the seller? Whp gains any advantage (other than the armament industry) by providing modern weapons to nations who, left to themselves, would have to settle their differences with bows and arrows?
A case can be made, of course, for the sale or exchange of arms between members of an alliance such as NATO or the Warsaw Treaty Powers; but has anyone ever profited by arming the Arabs or the Egyptians or the Tunisians or the Cubans, to quote only recent examples?—Yours faithfully, D. M. MACKINLAY Hamble Cottage, Warsash, Hampshire
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