Letter: I didn't vote for war in 1997

STRIPPING away the dubious "humanitarian" motivation of Western interventionist policy in Yugoslavia, the cynical mind is tempted to see a considerably more far-reaching strategy for the eventual establishment of some form of European superstate.

The necessary bribe of associated and possible future full membership of the EU being offered to the Eastern European states in return for co- operation with Nato, suggests such a scenario. As members of the pan-Slavic brotherhood, possessing access to the Mediterranean, an intransigent Serbia would be a strategic obstacle to those bent on forging a unified European power stretching from the Atlantic to the Bosphorus - and so effectively containing any future Russian revival.

Tony Blair's crusading vision, one suspects, now contains a central role in such a superstate for himself, newly resplendent in the Boadicean blue of Thatcheristic bellicosity.