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To Peter Sluglett's credit, he was campaigning for democracy and human rights in Iraq long before Tony Blair discovered it would be a good venue for war. Sluglett also concedes that recent US-UK ventures in Afghanistan and Kosovo have done little for democracy or human rights. Very possibly because they were not meant to.

But he goes off the deep end in suggesting that at least war worked in 1945 in terms of Germany and Japan. Leaving aside the fact that if a world war were required to deal with every regional dictator we would have war without end, has Sluglett considered how the second world war might have ended had George W. Bush been around? My guess is that the US would have made its peace with Hitler and attacked Stalin.

Keith Flett
Tottenham, London