WAR ON IRAQ - THE debate goes on as to whether or not a war against Iraq is justified. There are strong arguments being made for and against action.

One point, however, appears constantly from those who oppose a war and that is the almost sanctified status they attribute to the United Nations and the need for a second resolution.

Before too many people are lulled into a mesmeric state, they should examine more closely the credentials of the UN.

The UN is essentially a forum that gives legitimacy to tyrannical states and despotic leaders to participate alongside western democracies and otherwise stable governments in the shaping of world events.

Sadly, as with its predecessor the League of Nations, the UN or any other institution intended to become the embryonic World Government, it is collectively capable of acts of gross stupidity. The past two or three weeks illustrates perfectly this propensity for insanity.

In late December it was announced that the next country to chair the UN Committee on Human Rights is to be... Libya.

As if this gross insult to reason and sanity were not enough, we now learn that the next country to chair the UN Conference on Disarmament is to be, wait for it... Iraq.

What level of credibility can be attached to an institution that can reach such decisions? - Dave Pascoe, Press Secretary, UK Independence Party, Hartlepool Branch.

PETER Mullen and myself have one thing in common: each of us wears a dog collar signifying that we are priests in the Church of England. But, there the resemblance ends.

His pro-war anti-Iraq sermons in your columns make me wonder if he has read, let along understood, the non-violent teaching of Jesus in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke.

He writes as if war were a game played by the lead soldiers in the cardboard fortress which I received as a boy aged seven at Christmas 1942. They were holding rifles.

Now, 61 years later, it is missiles which not only kill en masse, but also cause cancer and other deadly diseases.

He sees war as goodies versus baddies. He never writes of war in human terms, the slaughter of the innocent (men, women, children, babies), as if God were on our side against the devil on the other side, as if by shedding innocent blood our armed forces were establishing peace and justice. His God differs radically from mine. - Rev John Stephenson, Sunderland.

PETE Winstanley (HAS, Jan 24) again blames the West for the troubles in Iraq and says we supplied arms to Saddam.

Does he imagine we were the only country to supply arms? Very many countries supply arms with impunity since no mention is ever made of this fact.

If the West is hated, it is mainly due to the propaganda espoused by those who should be prosecuted for inciting race hatred against Westerners.

To blame America for the troubles of the world is highly suspect because America was strictly isolationist right up until 1941 when Pearl Harbor dragged it into World War Two. Before that it kept out of international affairs. - Peggy Gowling, Cramlington.

FIRE SERVICE

DURING the firefighters' dispute we are seeing the true face of New Labour.

Tony Blair's henchman, John Prescott, has threatened the firefighters with Government legislation to force them to accept the will of Tony Blair's dictatorship because Mr Prescott himself has no answer to a democratic dispute.

The man who went from ship's steward to shop steward has forgotten his past apparently. Two Jags has become everything he used to hate.

Let me take you back to 1993 when the Tories were in power. The Yorkshire and Humberside region of the FBU organised a march and rally in Leeds under the banner Save Your Fire Service. Speaker after speaker lined up to protest about Government under-funding of the fire service and implications on pay.

Top of the bill was John Prescott, an ardent defender of the fire service.

Sadly, your working-class background disappears when you become middle-class Deputy Prime Minister and defender of the word according to Tony Blair. - Jeff Ashton, Darlington.

PIG FARMING

WHATEVER next! Farmers could face a fine of up to £1,000 or three months in jail for not providing toys for their pigs.

I wonder how much it has cost to come up with this idea.

I can't wait to see what the EU comes up with on April 1. - M Newell, Bedale.

ASYLUM SEEKERS

AS a teacher of history it is remarkable that the current ugly mood against asylum seekers is very reminiscent of the sequence of events which took place before the Nazis came to power in Germany. Only then the targets were Jews.

In the late 1920s leading German newspapers whipped up race hatred using scare stories not too dissimilar from those used by bigoted British newspapers such as the Sun, Express and the Mail. The result then was that press helped transform the Nazi Party from a fringe thug movement into a mainstream political force.

Already we are seeing electoral gains made in Britain by similar parties of the far-right.

In the 1930s the British Tory Party was a mixture of Nazi appeasers and, in some cases, jack-boot lickers. Today history repeats itself with the Tories calling for the detention of all asylum seekers in camps, even though, according to the police, asylum seekers are less likely to commit crimes than the native population.

In the late 1930s the Nazis rounded Jews up into detention camps, except in those days they were called concentration camps. A few years later they gassed them. - Name and address supplied.