Letter: Collateral damage

The line from Robert Burns "O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us" applies to our air force and what it stands for at home and abroad.

To us, the RAF evokes the image of fighter pilots and the Battle of Britain; abroad it stands for wanton destruction and the pointless saturation-bombing of civilians. We protest that our brave bomber crews had a causality rate in the Second World War higher than any force other than the U-boats - but both groups were widely perceived as neo-terrorists.

After three months of shooting up the suburbs of Tripoli and other "targets", we are doing little more than shifting rubble and increasing our already deplorable rate of "collateral".

In recent decades, we flattened the suburbs of Dresden, Baghdad, Belgrade and a hundred other cities and if this is all we can contribute to world peace, we should stay home.

DR JOHN CAMERON

Howard Place

St Andrews, Fife