Given its history with the West, Iran has every right to want to defend itself

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Donald Rumsfeld meets Saddam Hussein in 1983 during Iraq’s war with Iran (Getty)

In 1951 the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, visited the US. In 1953 the CIA, with the collusion of MI6, plotted a coup to drive Mosaddegh into exile. The reason? He had declared that the oil in the ground belonged to the Iranian people, not to foreign oil companies.

The US then brought back the Shah of Iran. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was not the scion of some ancient dynasty, as he pretended to be, he was the son of an Iranian army officer who himself had engineered a coup in 1921, removing the then Shah. In turn, in 1979 Reza Pahlavi had to flee the country to save his life and to retire on the fortunes he had pilfered from his own people.

In 1980 Iraq attacked Iran, starting a war which lasted eight years. Iraq was supported by the US, receiving satellite intelligence and military hardware as well as pesticides and poisons to use in its attacks against Iran. Iran’s main struggle was to keep its military hardware, weapons supplied to the Shah mainly by the US and the UK, going without spare parts. Donald Rumsfeld, the then US secretary of defence visited Iraq in 1983 and 1984 to show American support for Iraq and to shake hands with Saddam Hussein.

Since 2002 Iran has been pilloried as one of the axis of evil. In 2003 the US and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, based on false intelligence and under the pretext that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Tony Blair famously sold his warmongering on the fear that Iraqi WMD could be ready to deploy within 45 minutes. Iraq is now a country ruled by its Shia majority, no longer suppressed by a Sunni minority. One could not really make all of this up.

The question here is why would Iran not want to arm and defend itself against a world, led by the US and the Sunni states of the Middle East, that has been so hostile for so long?

Gunter Straub
​London

In the past the UK sheltered people from hostile environments – now we’ve created our own

A hostile environment towards Protestants was apparent in Catholic France in the 1650s. My Huguenot forebears left to settle in Spitalfields, where they probably contributed to the Protestant church there. They did their business and moved on.

A very hostile environment towards Jewish people occurred in Eastern Europe and Russia. People fled. Some came to Spitalfields where they took over and converted the church building into a synagogue. Another very hostile environment in Bangladesh brought many people to Spitalfields where, in time, settlers took over and converted the building into a mosque.

Through this one building UK hospitality is demonstrated. That our government should develop a policy based upon creating a hostile environment is shameful and worthy of all condemnation. Thoroughly nasty from the “nasty party”.

Robin Le Mare
Allithwaite, Cumbria

Teachers’ pensions have never been that simple

In G Forward’s letter (‘Millennials might be having a tough time financially, but we should tax corporations to make up for this, not pensioners’) he lists teachers among those with taxpayer-funded pensions. This is erroneous. I am in receipt of a teacher’s pension which was funded by my own contributions and those of my employer, like any ordinary worker.

Furthermore, for many years there was a serious abuse in teachers’ pensions, which grew at a notional three per cent interest – less then than the money I would have earned if it had been invested freely, which resulted in pressure on the fund. Thatcher’s government persistently refused to rectify this injustice, and eventually it took John Major to put it right. The teachers’ fund is underwritten by the government but it was always contributory.

Francis Beswick
Stretford

Just a small point of order for G Forward. Teachers’ pensions are not taxpayer funded. Teachers’ pay in a substantial amount of their salary, plus a proportion of their national insurance payment is diverted into the fund. Teachers currently in receipt of the pension rely on sufficient serving teachers continuing to opt in. I was a teacher. I am in receipt of my pension. I paid for it over 38 years of service.

Marie Robson
Doncaster

Actually, passengers have lots of choice on the East Coast Mainline

Patrick Heardman’s claims that passengers have “no other choice” (‘Never mind a ‘shakeup’, nationalising the railways is the only way to solve the issues with British trains’) but to travel with Virgin Trains on the northern section of our east coast route, or that we can charge “very high prices” as a result, are untrue.

In addition to Virgin Trains, four other companies operate on the northern part of the East Coast Mainline. Someone travelling between Newcastle and York, for example, can choose between three different train operators with fast, frequent services across most of the day, or can travel by coach or car on one of two trunk roads connecting the cities. If they chose to travel this route with us they’d pay, on average, 1 per cent more than at the beginning of the franchise in 2015, while the Retail Price Index measure of inflation has increased by six percentage points in that time.

The reason we’ve been able to attract more people to rail is, quite simply, by improving the service to customers while offering competitive prices.

David Horne
Managing director of Virgin Trains East Coast

If cigarette smoke is the root of all evil, then why have we lived for so long?

While not doubting the veracity of the research on particulates originating from tobacco smoke being recycled as third-hand pollution and interacting with nitrous oxide from car exhausts to create potential carcinogens, there is one simple observation I would like to make. Those of us who lived and worked in the period when smoking was commonplace in homes, the workplace, cinemas, pubs and the top decks of buses should all be dead by now if the threat posed by third-hand smoke was so great.

Instead, we are the longest living generation in recorded history, and are likely, if the projections are to be believed, to live longer than the generation living in this relatively tobacco smoke-free world where obesity and accompanying type 2 diabetes is the greater threat. By the way, I am a non-smoker.

Patrick Cleary
Honiton, Devon