‘Unsettling Allied Enemies’

Your editorial (April 8), “Unsettling Allied Enemies,” is grossly unjust to the Greek government and seriously misleads your readership particularly because of its superficial plausibility.

Greece’s economic problems are largely caused by her defense expenditures, 7% of her gross national product, the highest of any European NATO nation, against the Turkish threat. Do you truly believe that Greek governments, past and present, have manufactured these Greco-Turkish crises in order to divert national attention from Greece’s economic difficulties when it would have been far easier to eliminate the basic cause of these difficulties by redeploying that nation’s meager resources from national defense to more productive areas?

How can you explain the full support given by the opposition to the handling of the recent crises by the Andreas Papandreou government when it would have been natural for them to denounce his action if your contention that the crises was manufactured by the Greeks were true?

Alas, the eastern threat to Greece is neither manufactured nor imagined by the Greeks, as the sad reality of the occupation of Cyprus, the presence of the Turkish Aegean Army with its landing ships off the Greek islands, the frequent violation of Greek airspace and the virtual elimination of the Greek minority amply demonstrate.

A.D. BERK

Malibu