IRAQ: THE Allied forces secured a brilliant military victory in the war against Iraq.

As things turned out, Saddam Hussein was removed from power and the Iraqi people were given their freedom.

Before the war was started, I remember an American military spokesman saying that the Allies were going to liberate the Iraqi people and this is what they achieved.

As for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and whether they exist or not, I find it inconceivable that Tony Blair would risk the fate of his Government by not telling the truth on the matter. - LD Wilson, Guisborough.

ARE those now harping about the apparent absence of WMDs in Iraq being deliberately or genuinely obtuse?

Surely it's notorious that such weapons use essential ingredients in tiny quantities. A thimbleful of anthrax could wipe out the entire population of Northern England.

Given that terrorists have concealment - of both things and people - off to a fine art and that Iraq is a large and diverse area, searching for WMDs there makes looking for the proverbial needle a doddle by comparison. It may take years to find them but they are there right enough. - Tony Kelly, Crook.

TONY Blair is up to his knees in a mire entirely of his own making.

If the WMD issue is not resolved soon he will be up to his neck in it.

Mr Blair failed to see that Bush and Rumsfeld had long decided to go to war and only waited long enough to get Blair on board.

Reputedly, 7,000 civilians died in Iraq, many of them women and children. The country is wrecked and Saddam Hussein is nowhere to be found.

Apparently, the majority of Americans think war in Iraq was a good thing.

Of course, when the Twin Towers were destroyed in New York, the majority of people in Arab countries thought it was a good thing.

How you surmount these opposite views would test the wisdom of Solomon let alone the somewhat lesser intellects of Bush and Blair. - Hugh Pender, Darlington.

WHAT a shambles British politics is now. We have so many non-elected groups and advisors running this country no one now knows who is telling the truth anymore.

It now appears that someone is not telling the truth about how Parliament came to the opinion that war against Iraq was necessary.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee says that it is going to hold its own inquiry into what has happened, but why? It has no power to call for members of the security services to appear before it and give evidence in public. We will still be left with Downing Street and all of its spin doctors telling Parliament and the British people what it wants them to believe.

I believe that all advisors and spin doctors should be barred from British politics. There are 600-plus elected people in the House of Commons, all of them claiming a very good wage packet. Surely out of all these people there are enough to run the country in an honest and truthful manner without having to resort to these spin doctors to produce a story people are going to believe. - Peter Dolan, Newton Aycliffe.

AS the Government struggles to prove it did not mislead the country over Iraq's military capability, we are told that the entire affair is the result of 'rogue elements' in the intelligence services who are conspiring against the Government.

This latest example of Government paranoia has echoes of the Stephen Byers/Jo Moore resignation scandal when we were told that it was senior civil servants conspiring against the Government.

What are we going to be told next - that growing NHS waiting lists are simply the product of conspiratorial patients? Perhaps rising levels of violent crime are just a fabrication created by anti-New Labour victims.

Of one thing we can be sure, whatever negative publicity the Government attracts, it will never be the fault of the Government itself. - Simon Cawte, Darlington.

THE failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has caused allegations of lies and falsification by the American President, the British Prime Minister and the intelligence services. But what if another solution exists?

It is known that 11 per cent of Iraq's WMD arsenal was destroyed in the first Gulf War and the remaining 89 per cent destroyed by UN inspectors. This not only left Saddam with no WMDs but placed him a position where he was vulnerable to external attack and internal revolt. However, by using deceptive tactics, such as feeding false information to those considered untrustworthy, creating and ensuring the release of documents which showed, if only on paper, that Iraq was developing WMDs, was Saddam able to make the world think he had WMDs and thus prevent any external attack.

The CIA and MI6, siding with caution, naturally desired an independent and impartial third party to provide sufficient confirmation that the documents showing WMD retention and development by Iraq were real. Enter Hans Blix, who gave the independent third party confirmation the intelligence services needed.

Although my theory doesn't prove or disprove the existence of WMDs, it does go some way to explain why when Iraq was invaded, WMDs were never used and the failure to find any WMDs or any one involved in their development and storage. Equally, if my theory is correct then neither Tony Blair nor George Bush lied to anyone nor were they deceived by the intelligence services. - CT Riley, Spennymoor.