REGARDING your editorial on the real challenge for Iraq (September 20), I almost despair of Mr Blair's tunnel vision on matters concerning the Middle East, but thanks to Messrs Blair and Bush for removing Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Iraqis. Now it's their turn to go. But it won't happen through the ballot box because of our own messy affairs, but internally, by members of the Labour Party.

There are ways of overcoming terrorism other than by the futility of waging war and they have to come from within the host nation. After 30 years of the troubles in Northern Ireland, Mr Blair is still having to return to the mainland without a settlement to the Good Friday Agreement but, at last, people of opposing ideologies are prepared to meet and discuss a way forward in a peaceable manner. It has taken time, effort, courage and humility.

We believe that the intelligentsia and common folk of Iraq would prefer to have a system of government along the lines of what the west calls democracy. We cannot impose it from without, neither can we try to enforce measures that may cause offence to its peoples - eg, is census-taking really acceptable to the Muslim psyche? Do we in the west truly understand their way of thinking - and respect it?

No, in my opinion we should stay out of Iraq's politics as of now and support the populace in practical ways, rebuilding infrastructure and basic services that the UK and US effectively destroyed. Enough is enough, Mr Blair, of self-deception and tilting at windmills. It's too dangerous for our world.

Janet Cunningham,

1 Cedar Avenue, Stirling.

IAN F M Saint-Yves claims that it is ''not possession of nuclear weapons which poses the greater danger, but the knowledge of how nuclear weapons are produced'' (Letters, September 21).

This is not true. Mere knowledge is not evil. We have the knowledge of how to manufacture Zyklon-B and build gas chambers, but have made a conscious decision not to use this knowledge. We also have knowledge of garrotting, flaying, impaling, disembowelling, etc, but we do not act on it. Likewise we have outlawed torture

- unless you have the bad luck to fall into the hands of American ''justice'' in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

His apparent nostalgia for the days of ''mutually assured destruction'' and the assumption that this was ''the cornerstone of peace'' are equally misplaced. During that period, the

US waged wars in abundance by proxy in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala, the Congo and Namibia. Nor do I accept the definition of peace implied in his argument. Peace is not the mere absence of war. Peace is an enterprise of justice. It arises out of just relationships between individuals and between states.

There can be no peace when one small group of nations claim the

God-given right to threaten nuclear mass murder and endanger all life on the planet, while at the same time expressing moral outrage that any other state should contemplate doing likewise. ''Don't do as I do, do as I say'' is the most hypocritical of all postures - and this is precisely the position of the US and the UK on nuclear WMD. Why do we point the finger at ''terrorists''? The US and the UK have been nuclear terrorist states for 50 years.

In truth, I find it incomprehensible - a matter of near despair - that anyone can look into the eyes of little

Oksuatski Raiou (page 7, September 21), the six-year-old girl who stopped growing when she was three because of nuclear poisoning from Semipalatinsk, and still rationalise the satanic evil of nuclear weapons.

Add to the tragedy of this little Kazakh girl the unheard cries of the unseen victims of our own nuclear testing on the islands of Rongelap and Belau in the Pacific, on the Australian indigenous peoples in Meralinga, the Shoshone in Nevada, and the victims of our depleted uranium weapons in Kosovo and Iraq, where children play in land forever contaminated with radioactivity, and gross birth defects and childhood cancers have multiplied ten-fold, and you have a catalogue of pain and suffering inflicted on the innocent that would make a stone weep.

But we are made of sterner stuff, and so we press blindly on. We are already working on a replacement for Trident.

God forgive us.

Brian Quail,

2 Hyndland Avenue, Glasgow.

David Stevenson feels that if the ''new war'' in Iraq ''weren't so tragic it would be laughable'' (Letters, September 21). I cannot conceive of a war that was, or is, not tragic. Can he?

David Carvel,

2 Manse Drive, Biggar.