As usual, Robert Fisk not only raises an important issue in his column (Belfast Telegraph, November 17) but provides interesting historical information which might usefully be looked at by some of those cheering for heroes returning from what can no longer be called ‘battlefields’.

Yes, the battlefields are there, but unlike in times past, modern wars are not confined to areas where men meet to slaughter one another.

Capitalism’s technology, almost absent where it could be vitally applied, no longer confines its industrialised murder to the battlefield.

Beginning with episode two of the 20th century world war which saw almost four times as many deaths of non-combatants as combatants, modern warfare is ruthlessly waged against the innocent.

Even heroes in an aeroplane dropping a 2,000kg bomb over Baghdad with, as one American general proclaimed, “the accuracy to hit a garage door” must acknowledge that what the same general cynically called “collateral damage” would be mostly innocent human beings.

Is it naivete or a surfeit of the real causes of war that allows jurists, politicians and Church leaders to insist that murdering a single prisoner is a ‘war crime’ and dropping tonnes of bombs on a large conurbation can be part of a ‘just war’?

Surely that latter phrase is now nothing but an absurd anachronism.

Richard Montague

Belfast