Well done The Argus for alerting me to Martin Bell's excellent documentary called 30 Minutes, on Channel 4 last Friday, which featured General Sir Michael Rose speaking his mind about the Iraq war (The Argus, January 10).

I first heard Sir Michael speak at the Chichester Festival in 1998.

He had been commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia in 1994 and I was keen to hear his opinions on that bloody civil war.

For many years, I had the pleasure of welcoming more than 2,000 Yugoslav students to my school. As a result, I became increasingly familiar with the people and politics of Yugoslavia, which was one of the reasons I was so keen to hear Sir Michael speak.

At the meeting, I was, therefore, delighted when Sir Michael not only called Nato "spin doctors" but said there were no goodies in Bosnia but that the Serbs, Croats and Muslims were equally bad.

I was astonished to hear a senior British officer speaking so fearlessly but he is a man of principle.

On 30 Minutes, Sir Michael was true to form when he told Martin Bell, "Blair should be impeached" over Iraq.

Bell asked him, had he been serving, whether he would he have resigned. Sir Michael replied: "I certainly would have. There's no way I could have taken the Army to war on such flimsy grounds."

Well done, Sir Michael, for cutting through the spin. Martin Bell's concluding words help explain Sir Michael's reluctance to go to war: "In the wars of the early-20th Century, the casualties were 90 per cent military, ten per cent civilian. In modern warfare, those proportions are reversed.

"That's what we've achieved in a 100 years - the ability to kill each other indiscriminately on an industrial scale."

-E Evans, Hove