The distinction between war and murder becomes a fine one...

I would rather a hundred radicals and their families be vaporized than a single US soldier step foot on foreign soil.

Tom Reilly (born 1960) is an Irish author and newspaper columnist (Life of Reilly, Drogheda Independent), who has written books on Oliver Cromwell and religion, as well as a book based on his own newspaper columns among others. To date in total, he has published eight books, two of which have been conventionally published, the other six have been self-published. A native of Drogheda, County Louth, Reilly is a director of a local printing company called Burex Manufacturing Ltd. of Dunleer, Louth, and a founder director of the Myteam.ie brand, which launched in late 2008. He spent most of his working life in the printing and allied trades and is an avid local historian.

Reilly's best-known work on Cromwell is the highly contentious tome, Cromwell – An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland (1999), which holds that Cromwell did not intentionally target civilians during the campaign. He was quoted as stating: "Cromwell's entire Irish mission was fought on a purely military basis, and it is to his enormous credit that he never once departed from those parameters."

Primarily as a result of the work of nineteenth century nationalists (notably John Prendergast and Fr Denis Murphy), Cromwell has for most Irish people become the personification of barbarity, religious intolerance and English conquest. He has been accused of being a war criminal and of being an early ethnic cleanser. They recount tales of thousands of defenceless Irish citizens, men, women and children, all put to the sword at the hands of “Old Ironsides” and his men during their scorched earth campaign.

In actual fact Cromwell was framed.

Cromwell – An Honourable Enemy first saw the light of day in 1999 and has been largely dismissed by most scholars. Although some academics welcomed it with a certain ambivalence, it has certainly not been adopted by many – although it has been received more generously outside Ireland. Yet – and this is most remarkable – it has never been seriously challenged by any historian anywhere.

Michael O Siochru leads the charge of protesters. Yet his recently published God’s Executioner falls abysmally short of presenting a serious challenge to Honourable Enemy. Amazingly he engages in wild speculation. I’m still shocked by his incredible assertions on this matter, with nothing solid whatsoever to back it up. The facts are there for all to see. This is not rocket science.

In fact one wonders at the erudite author’s motivation in making such assiduous efforts to interpret the well-known and oft-quoted contemporary sources in such an inequitable, some might say biased, way. Instead, Ó Siochrú and his ilk should be running to the printing presses to (at least) temper the school textbooks in order that they promulgate a balanced view of the events.

The promotional literature accompanying the book highlights the fact that the same author has scripted the two-part documentary series on Irish television station RTE this September about Cromwell in Ireland.

In this book he has gone out on a limb, put his reputation on the line so to speak, and if this is the best shot he can take to justify a civilian massacre on a large scale, it looks like he will live to regret it. Several experts of the period come to mind who might be inclined to take a different, more even-handed, view of the available evidence.

Of course civilians could have got caught in the crossfire in Drogheda and Wexford, killed as a result of collateral damage, etc. etc. etc. Well, duh! But there was no policy to kill the innocent, nor is there any concrete evidence that suggests such a thing occurred.

Historians have taken a wide birth of my book because I have entered their world and proved them (generations of academics) wrong. I have in fact taught my granny how to suck eggs. First they castigated me, then they dismissed me, then some of them (Taidgh O Hannrachain) even said they said that they knew this all along – it was nothing new!!!.

If they knew this all along, then why in the name of all that is holy are we still delivering nineteenth century propaganda to children in the 21st century?

The historian James Graham Leyburn has said of Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland: ‘What Cromwell did deserves to be ranked with the horrors perpetrated by Gengis Khan. His pacification of Ireland has left scars on that country which have never been forgotten or forgiven.’

Oliver Cromwell is completely innocent of killing the ordinary unarmed people of Ireland and I defy anyone to prove otherwise.

izzy, I know all about the arms trade.
And I agree with you.
I know where you stand on the issues you've mentioned.
But I don't think that is the intended subject of this thread.

What I'd really like to know is where US Democrats/liberals here stand on the escalation of the drone attacks.
And their reasons for whatever positions they might hold.

After 9/11 there was a lot of talk about how the men behind the attack were cowards.

How much more so is that with drones?

At least the hijackers sacrificed themselves.

There are plenty of stories about how innocent civilians have been targetted by drone attacks,
and they give the impression that this is a remote controlled 'war' carried out by technocrats scared of getting their hands dirty.

It's not so easy to tell the difference, from the air, between terrorist groups and innocent civilians.
They act as a recruiting sergeant far more effectively than any amount of Al Qaida videos.

(I have a mouth on me).

In the entire history of the United States, the Americans haven't yet committed a fraction of the murders and dislocations carried out by the so-called British Empire over the course of three centuries--in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the Americas, Africa, India and China.