Sanctioning war

To the editor:

Thanks to the Journal-World and reporter Leita Walker for the excellent coverage of Saturday’s march in opposition to U.S. intervention in Iraq. I want to clarify a comment from me that was included in the Sunday article.

I do believe that economic strategies can be important tools for social justice (Cesar Chavez’s use of the boycott during his campaign to organize migrant farm workers is a good example). In such cases, economic leverage is used by a movement of people who have fewer numbers and lesser power, as a way to equalize the power balance.

I don’t, though, support the use of economic sanctions by an extremely powerful country such as the United States to bring another, less developed, country around to “our” way of thinking (the 40-plus year economic boycott of Cuba is a good example). In those cases, the existing imbalance of power becomes even more skewed and the often-devastating effects on those countries are every bit as violent as the effect of war.

Lynn Anderson,

Lawrence