Lebanon: who’s to blame?
From Nicholas Millman
Sir: It was refreshing to read your editorial (22 July) after a week of witnessing the rest of the British media sadly misrepresent the Middle East crisis. In typical fashion Hezbollah has manipulated the journalists on the ground to the point where, for example, Channel 4 News must now be considered an effective extension of Hezbollah propaganda.
The constant talk here of a ‘disproportionate’ response by Israel is baffling. A gang of nasty thugs, with only a tenuous claim to represent a sovereign state, violate the border of a neighbouring sovereign state and kidnap her soldiers. In the meantime they continue to rain rockets indiscriminately on residential areas within that state and to send suicide bombers to cause death and mayhem to innocent civilians. I wonder at Israel’s remarkable restraint in the face of such provocation, and that she did not long ago resort to nuclear weapons to secure her borders.
Nicholas Millman
by email
From Simon Elliot
Sir: As Israel continues its senseless bombardment of Lebanon, of non-military targets such as milk factories and grain silos, your leading article last week looks more and more bankrupt and immoral. An immediate ceasefire ‘at any cost’ is imperative as the price now being paid, in humanitarian terms, is wholly unacceptable. Everyone agrees that it is, as you say, ‘ludicrous …that a sovereign state should never react against incursion’. But it is even more ludicrous to suggest what is happening now is justifiable retaliation.
Quite apart from the ethical objections to the hundreds of civilian casualties, the problem with using force and not diplomacy in this case is that it is highly unlikely to succeed. Will the annihilation of a state, the clinical dismantling of its infrastructure, the displacement of half a million people undermine support for Hezbollah and bring about a stable Middle East? The odds are stacked heavily against it. The British government has in the past been respected for its diplomacy, but we are losing friends and influence by our continued refusal to speak out against the unethical and counterproductive use of force.
Simon Elliot
Blandford, Dorset
From Clive Christie
Sir: What David Selbourne misses in his doom-laden analysis of the contest between Islamism and the West (‘The Islamists are winning’, 22 July) is that Islamism — like communism — is fatally crippled by the fact that it depends on a crackpot solution to humanity’s problems. There are very few Westerners who don’t, ultimately, find Islamism and its public antics more ludicrous than sinister. Islamists know this; this is why they are so desperate to enforce ‘respect’ for Islam on the rest of the population. Islamism can also maintain its aura of ‘terrifying’ invincibility because of the fear it inspires among metropolitan opinion-formers — people who are not noted for their moral courage. But in the end Islamism will crumble before humanity’s most lethal weapon against crackpot ideologies: a sense of the ridiculous.
Clive Christie
Aberystwyth, Wales
When Wilson cut and ran
From John Parfitt
Sir: Lord Hurd (‘The ghosts of Suez return’, 22 July) is chronologically incorrect when he refers to ‘Labour’s decision to abandon the Gulf in 1968’. In June 1964 I took command of the landing ship Messina in the Gulf. It was an open secret that, stuffed with tanks, soldiers and enough explosives to flatten Baghdad, we were there to deter Iraq from attacking Kuwait, as we had in 1961.
After his election in 1964 Harold Wilson, with an anti-colonial lobby to placate and eager for cash to bribe the electorate, decided to dismantle the British establishment in the Gulf which had kept the peace for over a century. The decision to scuttle may not have been announced until 1968, but in early 1965 I was ordered to bring Messina home, as was my senior officer in his HQ ship. That alone was enough to tell even the dimmest observer what Wilson was planning, despite our assuring the Gulf rulers and the Americans (who were worried about their own commitments elsewhere) of our support.
The foreign exchange savings were about £26 million p.a. and the Gulf rulers were willing to pay that out of the petty cash from their oil. In view of what has happened since, it is a classic case of what happens if you don’t pay the insurance.
John Parfitt
New St Painswick, Gloucestershire
High culture in Istanbul
From Osman Streater
Sir: Mark Glazebrook’s article about the Rodin exhibition in Istanbul (Arts, 22 July) may be well meant, but, boy, is it patronising! For example, right now the 34th International Istanbul Music Festival is on. That’s the 34th — not the first. Andras Schiff and Cecilia Bartoli are just two of the names performing for audiences at least as educated as any in London. Many of the performances take place in the Byzantine church of St Irene, a masterpiece of the iconoclastic period, which has been tastefully restored by the Turks. Some British critics might with advantage spend time there. Who knows, they might even have their misconception that the Istanbul public ‘may be more attuned to calligraphy’ shattered.
Osman Streater
London NW3
And/or confusion
From Chris Wright
Sir: In his review of David Leavitt’s biography of Alan Turing (Books, 15 July), Alexander Masters gets one of the most important contributions to mathematics (Gödel’s theorem) utterly wrong. Gödel didn’t ‘prove that no mathematical system can ever be shown to be consistent or complete’. He showed that no sufficiently expressive mathematical system could be consistent and complete.
Chris Wright
Clayton, Victoria, Australia
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