Should Britain intervene or stand back?

I GET increasingly annoyed with partisan views of the Iraq war. Too many people condemn the war because they’ve decided they don’t like Tony Blair and thus anything he did was wrong. The failure of Jeremy Corbyn’s team to acknowledge the huge improvements under the Blair government is testament to this. If this were the late Thirties, those who now criticise the Iraq war would no doubt have been appeasing Hitler. After all, there was no ‘evidence’ of the Holocaust at that point. Many seem to have decided that the people of nations such as Iraq, despite begging for our intervention, don’t really need our help and are much better left with their tyrant while we bury our heads in the sand. Through my company, I spent quite a while delivering education projects in the Kurdistan capital, Irbil. I was last there in April 2014, just before the hostilities became too serious for us to go back. Most people who knew I was British used to give me the thumbs up sign and shout ‘Tony Blair!’ They believed Britain had been their saviour. When asked about weapons of mass destruction, they tell me unanimously: ‘If Saddam didn’t have those weapons, how did he launch chemical and gas attacks on the Kurds and kill more than a million of us? We can take you to the graves.’ They also say that one day the desert will give up all the evidence: they believe the weapons were buried there. They held in contempt those who were happy to let Saddam continue in power and continue slaughtering them.

MARTYN DAVIS, London. THE most appalling thing Tony Blair achieved in his three terms in power was to put Britain firmly among the ‘baddies’ of modern history. I grew up in the Fifties, firmly believing my country had put its buccaneering Victorian forays behind it and was now on the side of the good guys, booting the Kaiser out of Belgium and beating Hitler to a pulp. We backed out of India and Israel, neutralised communist insurgents in Korea, Aden and Malaysia, held the line in Cyprus and took the Falklands back from the invading Argies. Even the first Iraq War was justified, after Saddam invaded Kuwait. But with ‘shock and awe’ in 2003, Blair lined us up firmly with all the bad guys of history, from Ghengis Khan to Adolf Hitler — and for making me a party to that, I can never forgive him.

P. WILLIAMSON, Manchester. NOW we’ve recognised The Few who defended our country in the Battle of Britain, it’s only fair to pay tribute to the brave RAF pilot who flew the drone that executed two of our fellow citizens in Syria. It must take a special form of coldblooded courage to sit in an airconditioned office 1,000 miles from danger and track unsuspecting young men on a TV screen before pressing a button and watching them blown to bits. Will the media identify and glorify this hero as they do the Battle of Britain pilots? Or will the RAF require him — or her — to remain anonymous as they did when the RAF was illegally bombing Iraq (before our invasion, which was also illegal)? Our brave pilots were photographed by the media standing by their planes with their backs to the cameras as if ashamed or afraid to show their faces. We seem to have come a long way since 1940 when the RAF could take pride in its exploits.

DAVID H. LEWIS, Caerphilly.