Daily Times

Sir: Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the United States (US) has continued to engage in acts that damaged its moral standing. The first such act was its invasion of Iraq on the pretext of finding and destroying Saddam Hussain’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMDs). It later turned out that these WMD’s were imaginary, and that a country had been destabilised beyond recognition — destroying thousands of lives in the process — for no tangible reason.

Then there is Washington’s use of drone strikes to assassinate terrorists which has created more terrorists than it has killed, its selective action against militants in Syria and its abandonment of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, to please its allies in Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

However, now the American government has stooped to a new low. President Donald Trump’s “Zero tolerance” policy on immigration, which has resulted in immigrant children being separated from their parents to be held at detention centres is absolutely sickening. Though Trump signed an executive order last week, ordering that detainedfamilies be kept together,the damage has been done. After this development, the international community will not want to follow the American regime. This is the beginning of the end of the US as the “leader of the free world”.

MURTAZA HASSAN

Lahore

Published in Daily Times, July 2^nd 2018.