VALE of Glamorgan schools will be closed, and Cardiff and Newport brought to a standstill, in the first week of the new school year in order to safeguard the security of NATO leaders arriving for a summit that must be security nightmare.

It's not just the security of NATO leaders that is threatened but the future security of all of us, as the Middle East stands on the brink of a new Dark Age.

All modern warfare constitutes a war crime as it brings terror to innocent civilians causing Palestinians, and now Iraqis, to cry out for help from the UN, but this can only be forthcoming if national armies put their troops and weapons at the disposal of a UN peacekeeping force to stand between warring factions while the Security Council enforces arbitration.

Russia used its veto over Syria due to feeling threatened by so many former Warsaw pact countries joining NATO, now culminating in the prospect of losing Ukraine, when it was obvious that they would hold onto their Black Sea fleet in the Crimea even at the cost of a new cold war.

NATO has outlived its purpose as it is now more likely to cause war than to prevent it, with its leading powers bearing the heavy responsibility of invading Iraq, then the most secular state in the Middle East, before the UN weapons inspectors could finish their job.

The collapse of communism has allowed capitalism to spin out of control, and the collapse of the USSR has allowed NATO to behave in a not dissimilar fashion to the Hapsburg Empire, which can only be intensified by any EU/ US trade treaty.

Our leaders have persistently ignored history's most fundamental lesson that the means we use will determine the end we achieve. As we continue to pick up the pieces of the First World War, particularly in the Middle East one hundred years on, let us finally make this the war to end all wars, as the most fitting memorial to the fallen, before we all descend into a new Dark Age.

Margaret Phelps

Penarth

Vale of Glamorgan