Your editorial (6 January) on Qassem Suleimani’s assassination seems designed to appeal more to the “two legs bad, four legs good” anti-American left than to enlighten. Indubitably, timing, location and uncertain “consequence management” of this attack by the US are problematic. But your central assertions that the UK will be reduced to lapdog status by the need to jump into the same trench as the US and that an “imminent threat” by Suleimani had not been proved are overwrought.

On the latter, in the past 10 days, the US embassy and a joint US-Iraqi base in Kirkuk were attacked by an Iraqi Shia militia owing more loyalty to Suleimani than to the Iraqi state. One US contractor was killed but this was happenstance, not restraint. Suleimani’s attitude towards people’s lives are better revealed by the recent al-Quds-organised attacks on a Saudi oil refinery and Gulf shipping. That he wasn’t caught with a gun pointed at a US soldier is irrelevant. He was a general after all and didn’t need to be so directly engaged. His intent was clear, even if the imminent threat was more opaque.

As to the lapdog assertion, I doubt anything has changed. Since the fall of Singapore in 1942, Britain has been dependent on the US for its seat at the top table (Churchill thought December 1944 was the turning point). Post-Brexit, we may again be more dependent, but the fundamental correlation of forces has not altered.

This is a dangerous time and we need to proceed with care, so the prime minister’s relative silence is to be welcomed, not derided. Restraint and thoughtful engagement with the US and Iran – if they will listen – are key. Mindless knee-jerkery, whether of the pro- or anti-US variety, should be kept in the student bar where it belongs.

Col (Ret’d) Simon Diggins

Military adviser to the UN special representative Iraq, 2004-05; defence attaché, Kabul, 2008-10

• Julian Borger (Trump did not think this through, 4 January) says Qassem Suleimani “left the Middle East littered with corpses”. In the past few days, much of what has been written and said in the media and by politicians boils down to mild criticism of Trump’s action. What has not been questioned, including by the Guardian, is the broad acceptance of the US claim that Iran and its Shia proxies, commanded by Suleiman, were largely responsible for the insurgency against coalition forces in Iraq. One US spokesman even suggested the IEDs that killed coalition forces were manufactured in Iran. This makes no sense at all given that the insurgency’s aim was to destabilise the new Shia-governed and Iran-allied country.

The insurgency was led largely by Sunni extremists such as Isis, supported by former Ba’athists and probably Saudi Arabia. This is an important detail because it is being held up as the moral justification for the attack. But if it is a wholly false assertion, it would be as serious as the WMD lie that was used for the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Flavio Centofanti

London

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