Letter: Caging Saddam

Sir: I am puzzled by Andreas Whittam Smith's article "Nothing has felt quite right about the attacks on Iraq" (21 December). There must have been innocents among those we bombed at Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps we shouldn't have gone to war in 1939. Perhaps we should have taken the view that hundreds of thousands of innocents would die in the liberation of Europe, as they did, and that cost would be too high.

What does not "feel right" is not the attacks on Iraq but the pusillanimous reaction to American and British efforts to reduce its capacity to act aggressively. Or do we have to wait for a biological-chemical attack on Kuwait or Tel Aviv (which would really set off a regional fireball) for the rest of the world to take notice?