ON September 11, the world witnessed the grotesque mass murder of more than 6,000 people in the space of an hour.

We watched as people, many with remarkable courage, confronted death at the hands of hijackers. Most people would naturally offer their sincere condolences to the victims.

That sympathy should not extend to the US and British Governments, however. These self proclaimed leaders of the "free" world quickly assumed the pious expressions required to whip up a patriotic frenzy.

"The worst terrorist attack in history" ran the headlines: true, only if you ignore Western imperialism's own history. In the days after the World Trade Centre attack, Bush and Blair have set themselves up as 5-star generals in a war against terrorism.

A long list of the world's worst tyrants and mass murderers were, and are, financed, trained, armed and nurtured by the US and UK Governments: Mobutu (Congo); Marcos (Philippines); Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Suhauto (Indonesia), Noriega (Panama), for example. These tyrants were "the good guys" until their own interests as local warlords conflicted with the interests of global capital; it was only then that they became "evil".

The list of US aggression since 1954 is long: direct military interventions -- Korea (1950-53), The Dominican Republic (1965), Vietnam (1962-75), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Kuwait (1991), The Balkans (1990s). Large-scale involvement in an organisation of coups and destabilisation campaigns -- Italy (1948), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), East Timor (1975 onwards), Somalia (1992/3). Supply of arms or aid to overthrow or destabilise governments -- Cuba, Laos, Iraq, Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua. And this list does not include the sponsorship of terror in Palestine and Lebanon. Today's generals in the "Never-ending war against terrorism" are responsible for the deaths of 5,000 Iraqi children every month (UNICEF figures).

The biggest killer in the world today is poverty. Fourteen million children die every year. That is one child every two seconds! It is the equivalent to a Hiroshima bomb being dropped on the children of the world every three days. The poorest people of the world are at war with poverty -- and they are losing.

So why don't the leaders of the so-called "civilised" world use their billions to unleash a war on poverty? Simply because they create it and they need it. The impoverishment, the misery and destruction of two-thirds of the planet is necessary to ensure "economic growth" of the Western World.

Capitalism has no solution to the problems of poverty, alienation and war. Only a system founded on economic parity can form the basis of a society where there is social equality; a society based on people, not profit and control.

M Naughton

Oldhams Estate, Bolton