Your columnist Julian Cole is a humane and articulate man. I rarely disagree with a word he says which, as I have said before, ought to give him pause for thought.

His 'anti war' article (April 8) agonises with the question which haunts all humanitarian liberals faced with conflict such as we now see in Serbia: namely, is war ever justified?

My family has seen its fair share of war. My father was blasted unconscious for five weeks by a shell on the Somme. I was bombed as a child and still recall the air raid siren's wail. My eldest brother was shot by Jewish terrorists in Palestine.

I would like to be a pacifist but, for the sake of my children and their children, I dare not be. There are too many lunatic 'leaders' (so-called) at loose in the world.

'Turning the other cheek' and 'doing good to those who persecute you' are wise, humanitarian, Christian policies for anybody dealing with other rational liberals who have briefly lost their senses.

But for most weak humans they are impractical policies when dealing with murderous thugs such as Slobodan Milosevic and Sadam Hussein.

War is justified when, on a balance of evils, the greater evil is defeated by use of as much force as is necessary but no more. That is a simplification, but I state the basic concept.

So I strongly support NATO's bombing war against Serbia because ethnic cleansing is so evil that it cannot be tolerated within this wide world's beautifully diverse humanity.

However, the chilling reality since Hiroshima in 1945 is that war started against suicidal maniacs could now, very easily, end up destroying us all. Julian is right to be worried.

Coun Ted Batty,

York Road,

Barlby,

Selby.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.