A-bomb or B-movie?
Sir: I have no idea whether or not we really came close to WW3 last month, as your correspondents Douglas Davis and James Forsyth insist (‘We came so close’, 6 October), but one line in their exciting piece brings doubts to mind. After ‘secretly’ crossing into Syria (as opposed to coming in on a guided tour, presumably) soil samples collected by ‘elite’ Israeli commandos (thank heavens they didn’t use run-of-the-mill commandos) at Tartous ‘suggested that the cargo [from North Korea] was nuclear’.
Really? Presumably any such nuclear material would have been transported and stored in rather robust, sealed and shielded containers. If this stuff was radioactive enough, and leaky enough, for it to have contaminated the soil of Tartous, a biggish town, to such an extent in a matter of days then we would know about it. And the bombing — and subsequent scattering — of large amounts of weapons-grade plutonium or uranium-235 would have created some considerable local bother in the town and indeed along the whole Levantine coast. Hats off to the Israelis if they did indeed manage to put the kibosh on a Syrian A-bomb; however, there is a B-movie, James Bondish flavour to this story that invites a degree of grown-up scepticism.
Michael Hanlon
London SE5
Don’t blame the Jews
Sir: Jonathan Mirsky’s review of Mearsheimer and Walts’s The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy: The very special relationship (Books, 29 September) demonstrates how insidious the discourse about Israel has become. Mirsky talks glibly about ‘Israel’s expulsion of most of its Palestinian population’. No serious historian would support this assertion. In 1948, when Israel was established following the 1947 United Nations vote, the surrounding Arab states attacked with the aim of destroying the fledgling state. Many Palestinian Arabs fled, mainly to escape the fighting, some heeding the instructions of the Arab command to clear the field for the onslaught against the Jews, and some because of Israeli military action. To blame everything on the Jews seems to stray into very dangerous territory.
He goes on to claim that ‘[Israel] is immeasurably stronger than all of [its adversaries]’. Israel is a minute country, the size of Wales and with a population of seven million. It is surrounded by vast swaths of oil-rich Arab land and a billion Muslims, most of whom wish it destroyed. Again, this imagining of Israel as a force vastly more powerful than it is comes uncomfortably close to other traditional anti-Jewish rhetoric.
Mirsky then compounds his error by blaming Israel and the Israel lobby for the US invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. The decisions to attack Iraq and Afghanistan were taken by Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld, none of whom owe anything to the Israel lobby (indeed their main political hinterland is the pro-Arab oil industry). They took these decisions in the wake of 9/11. To suggest otherwise is again to buy into a well-worn and, one would have hoped, discredited conspiracy theory.
Richard Bolchover
London
Kill to conserve
Sir: Paul Johnson’s blast against shooting (And another thing, 6 October) overlooks an important fact. The wildlife in our countryside would be far less diverse without the land management which shooting brings. Research shows that where land is managed for game birds, other species thrive. There are more wrens, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, flycatchers, warblers and finches in areas where gamekeepers control foxes, crows and magpies, feed gamebirds and look after woodland, hedgerows and field-margins. Most gamekeepers are knowledgeable and instinctive conservationists. Responsible game management is good for nature conservation as a whole, as more and more non-shooting conservationists and objective commentators appreciate.
Teresa Dent
Chief executive, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust,
Fordingbridge, Hampshire
Behind the Times
Sir: Frank Keating (6 October) is as always informative, entertaining and interesting, even to someone indifferent to sport. He might be interested to know, however, that if Peter Cook’s father in colonial Africa read his newspapers in date order, one a day, he may have been following Mr Warburton in Maugham’s ‘The Outstation’. Warburton reads the Times on weekdays and the Observer on Sundays, exactly six weeks after the date of publication, and is driven to, in effect, condone the murder of an assistant who unwraps his papers ahead of time. Perhaps this practice (opening newspapers in order, not condoning murder) was common in colonial outposts? I’m sure your readers can tell us.
Ron Farquhar
London SW19
The princess diaries
Sir: It used to be the prerequisite of the late Alastair Forbes to pounce on those who made mistakes, and very often on Taki (High life, 29 September). May I briefly assume Ali’s mantle? I have worked out that Princess Michael is indeed a cousin of Taki’s ex-wife, Princess Alexandra von Schönburg-Hartenstein. She is fourth cousin through mutual descent from the Trauttmansdorff family and fifth cousin through shared descent from Joseph Johann Schwarzenberg and Pauline d’Arenberg. The Princess is also related to Etti Plesch herself in two ways. Etti’s third husband, Tommy Esterhazy, was a second cousin of Princess Michael’s grandmother. Etti also descended from Princess Therese of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, a first cousin of Queen Victoria’s father, Edward, Duke of Kent. This makes her a fifth cousin once removed of Prince Michael, and indeed of the Queen. If Taki still disbelieves me, I will be happy to bombard him with genealogical trees, which should preclude the need to descend to actual duelling.
Hugo Vickers
Ramsdell, Hampshire
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