MRS GAULT is obviously a woman of good will, but, unfortunately she seems a little confused about the situation in Iraq.

The only way to stop the suffering of the Iraqi people is to (a) lift the sanctions; (b) stop the illegal bombing of the country; (c) remove the 300 tons of depleted uranium dust left over by the Gulf War. It is very carcinogenic and will need a multi-nation effort to remove it.

As for the parallels she alleges between Yugoslavia and Iraq, they are misleading. Slobodan Milosevic was an autocrat and was quite capable of playing very dirty to increase his power and to sustain him in it. But, for all that, Yugoslavia was a multi-party democracy and Milosevic fell from power so suddenly because he had miscalculated and called a Presidential Election prematurely. He fiddled the results so that it looked as if he had done better than he had. But even he didn't pretend to have won it.

Saddam Hussein is a dictator -- and in this he is not alone among leaders in the Middle East. There are no multi-party elections, and he silences opposition by imprisonment, murder and torture. The idea of a population so worn out by suffering rising against him is just not on. He does not suffer from sanctions: they do. And yet paradoxically he is not without popularity: he is admired for standing up to the West against what many of his people see as bullying .

On Thursday, October 26, at 7.30pm, St Peter's Chaplaincy, Oxford Road, Manchester, there is a public meeting which will be concerned with the current situation in Iraq. Perhaps Mrs Gault would like to go to it?

Malcolm Pittock

St James's Avenue

Breightmet

Bolton