Letters to the Editor--England's Greatest Gift to the World?

Jonathan Schwarz writes in with two amusing letters written to The Guardian (UK), "Thank god," he adds, not even bothering to capitalize the G in God (which to me was a bit of a giveaway), "that The New York Times and the Washington Post don't run things like this." Hear, hear! We Americans prefer our humor safely in the mouths of paid professionals. In the wrong hands, free-range joking can lead to all sorts of dangerous things, like voting. Anyway, here are the letters:



· If Tony Blair imagines that those Labour MPs who voted for war are so spineless and unprincipled that they will allow him to get away with flat denials of all the accusations made against him by Clare Short and Robin Cook - apparently because no evidence has been presented by them, followed by promises of yet another dossier as a substitute for dealing with past discredited dossiers - he's probably right.

Geoff Woolf

South Harrow, Middx



· As a professional bureaucrat, I must strongly protest against the misuse of the term "bureaucratic" by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, to describe the US justification of war on the basis that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (General admits chemical weapons intelligence was wrong, May 31).



As should be well known, we bureaucrats never engage in deliberate lying, or, indeed, any other form of intelligent processing of information.

David Allen

Kinoulton, Notts"