Shaun Shute attempts to dismiss the Green Party and others who oppose the unjust and unprovoked war on Iraq, by linking Iraq with World War II (Letters 12/06/04). He is not alone Jack Straw, Donald Rumsfeld, right-wing tabloids and others have done the same.

Such Hitler analogies have long been the stock-in-trade of Anglo-American war propaganda. Nasser, Ho Chi Minh, Gaddafi, and Milosevic have all been compared to Hitler in crude attempts to justify wars of aggression.

The parallel between Iraq and Nazi Germany is transparently ridiculous. In the late 1930s, Hitler's Germany was the world's second largest industrial economy with a powerful military machine. It openly espoused an ideology of territorial expansion and posed a direct threat to its neighbours.

Iraq, by contrast, was a sanctions-drained developing country, with a devastated infrastructure and didn't even control all it's territory. As Colin Powell and others stated, Saddam was no threat to its neighbours, let alone Britain or the US.

Saddam was evil, but war should be a last resort. Blair's government has lacked courage and sought only to pacify the world's most powerful and potentially dangerous power. The war on terror is about oil and seeking to maintain a level of affluence at the point of a gun that the Earth cannot sustainably provide. Well-established international laws are ignored by the US in their efforts to retain overwhelming power. Little is done to identify and address the most serious underlying threats to global security.

We urgently need a different direction that stops arms sales to dictators, promotes peace and works towards common security.

Martin Whiteside, Gloucestershire Green Party