MIKE Cartwright (You Say, Saturday, April 19) was being unfair to the anti-war protesters by suggesting that they would be "dancing in the streets" if the war in Iraq had been a fiasco.

I have no doubt that they would have been as sorry as the rest of us. Our far superior forces were always going to win this war.... but at what cost and will the world be a safer place because of it?

Mr Cartwright is talking as though the whole mission has been successfully completed. The reason for going to war was because Saddam Hussein apparently possessed weapons of mass destruction. It is now looking as though this is not so.

Saddam Hussein has not been caught (did they really think he was going to hang around?) The allied troops are unpopular, and the infra-structure of Iraq is in a desperate state.

As far as our schoolchildren are concerned, protesting against the war would not seem to be a reasonable excuse for truancy.

However, I again must disagree with Mr Cartwright because I think that they are the ones who are thinking for themselves.

I suspect that you, Mr Cartwright, at your school in the 1940s, may well have been taught not to question the views of your elders and betters!

RICHARD CHAMINGS, Castlemorton Common, Malvern.