Letter: Action on Iraq

Sir: David Aaronovitch must be at least half my age, and therefore would not have experienced as a child the London Blitz - night after night living in an Anderson shelter, their corrugated iron sides shaking from the bombs dropping all around. Otherwise he would not have been so ready to state that there was "no alternative" to the bombing of Baghdad (Review, 22 December).

Can he really put pen to paper and admit, looking back at this war-torn century in which our species has been destroyed in greater numbers than ever before by our own hand, that there still really is "no alternative" to war?

What on earth was -and is - wrong with the lifting and ending of sanctions and giving the Iraqi people all the help we can muster to show the other, more humane side of our Western civilisation?

PETER PORTEOUS

Nutbourne, West Sussex