Letters

Without offence to Derek Robinson (Letters, October), and without being pedantic, a pedant being someone excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning (Oxford English Dictionary), "crescendo," in the same book, has a non-musical definition as the loudest point reached in a gradually increasing sound, an English definition, albeit of a word with an Italian origin. Tumbler's use of the word (Washington watch, September) was metaphorical (applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable).

Being pedantic, our friend in the cartoon on the same letters page will never find his troubles in that "kitbag" (long cylindrical canvas bag, used especially for carrying a soldier's clothes), since he is looking into a rucksack (a bag with shoulder straps).

Alan Forbes
Lindfield, West Sussex

Applauding opera
4th October 2007

Martin Kettle (September) insouciantly advises us that he has "no problem at all with people applauding… after arias if that's what they want to do." What right has he to speak on my behalf and, I imagine, quite a few other opera lovers who don't condone this barbaric custom?

Adam Czerniawski
Monmouth

Dilemmas of terror
12th October 2007

Conor Gearty's example of "approved terrorism, like the execution of an English king" (October) is a poor one. I guess he means the execution of Charles I, who was found guilty of the medieval (not Magna Carta) crime of "tyranny." A better example of 17th-century approved terrorism would be the non-crime of "regicide," to which the restored Stuarts applied the punishment for treason.

Robert Warne
Cardiff

Mission Accomplished 1
11th October 2007

Bartle Bull's "argument" (October), as far as I can make out, is that the situation in Iraq can be classified a "win" simply by virtue of the fact that one could imagine an outcome that would have been worse. The Sunni insurgency could have morphed into a uniformed standing army with a dedicated al Qaeda brigade, marched on Baghdad, and dropped an atomic bomb on both the Shia and itself, and the rest of the country's oil could have suddenly leaked across the border to Iran, allowing President Ahmadinejad to claim yet another source of power with which to bedevil us. Since all this didn't happen, we can be satisfied with the status quo. (Just be glad those quisling liberals didn't talk us out of our stay-the-course triumph.)

Bull is far too eager to glide past the corruption of Nouri al-Maliki's government. His claims of legitimacy for Maliki's regime are undermined by the fact that these so-called "democrats" are the primary source of the gang violence and the main beneficiaries of the theft of domestic resources and US aid, thus ruining their country as surely as anything perpetrated by Saddam's criminal junta. Worse, Bull's insistence on pooh-poohing the death and suffering of Iraq's people—those mere 1,500 or 2,500 or whatever it is that are dying every month—reveals not strategic insight, but moral cynicism.

Yes, the Sunnis are changing their tactics, in response to being crushed and ethnically cleansed. But with further sectarian violence blowing up within Shia society, one can only imagine that the Sunnis are biding their time until an opportune revanchist moment arrives. There was a civil war in Iraq, without uniforms or formal declarations, and the fact that the result is now a fait accompli—the ethnic cleansing of one of the world's great cities; up to 5m people displaced—could only be treated as a "victory" by someone blind with devotion to Bushist triumphalism.

Mark Haag
New York, via Prospect's blog

Mission accomplished 2
9th October 2007

Most of the "shocked" reaction to Bartle Bull's essay—both on the Prospect blog and elsewhere—comes from the pervasive Sunni-centric mindset of the western and Arab commentariat and media. Bull writes from the Iraqi Shia perspective, and, extraordinarily, his critics don't seem to realise this. If they do, they don't seem to consider it worthy of mention, even though the Shias are an 80 per cent majority in Arab Iraq.

It is as if the Afrikaaners had "owned" the prevailing regional and western view over the blacks during the ANC's struggle to obtain majority rule. The demographic equation in South Africa was almost the same as that in Arab Iraq—20 per cent whites to 80 per cent blacks and coloureds.

In taking a contrary "positive" view, Bartle Bull is stating what ought to be obvious to liberals: once the Shia majority of Iraq had been liberated from a tyrannical police state, once the Baath army had been disbanded, once the Baath party had been outlawed, and once the Iraqi education curriculum had been de-Baathed, the minority Sunni Arab rejectionist insurgency would eventually be defeated by the Shia majority by force of numbers alone. It is only the commitment of the US and the Iraqi government to the measures necessary to protect the Sunni minority that allows it to survive as a viable political entity in the new democratic Iraq.

Barbara Bishop
Melbourne, via Prospect's blog

Living with West Lothian
2nd October 2007

Jack Straw (October) makes a conclusive case against the in-and-out solution of "English votes for English laws" to the West Lothian conundrum. In the course of the demolition, he refers with some approval to the Northern Ireland situation between 1920 and 1972. But that situation differed from Scotland's today in two key respects. First, Northern Ireland sent only 12 MPs to Westminster: seldom enough to be a decisive "swing" factor. Second, its representation was scaled down by 30 per cent as a rough-and-ready answer to what we now call the West Lothian problem. The number would have been about 17 if constituencies had been made the same size as in Great Britain. That still looks the least bad response to an anomaly incapable of perfect solution. The alternative—doing nothing while Scotland continues to have its cake and eat it—is a great deal to ask. And it may become even more so if an election gives control at Westminster to a party with no majority of seats or votes in England.

Michael Quinlan
Banbury, Oxfordshire

National identity numbers
12th October 2007

David Birch's plan for an alternative national identity scheme (October) is one I could live with—if I had to. There's nothing wrong, and plenty right, with using modern cryptographic techniques to secure all sorts of civil transactions. But to do what Birch wants, it is essential to scrap the present scheme. Birch merely wants to "fix" it, but he ignores two fundamental points.

1. The problem for privacy is not inadvertent; it is a deliberate feature. The Birch solution is designed to minimise data-sharing and limit data collection by state agencies. The whole purpose of the government's plan is to maximise it, with the national identity register being a central reference point providing both data and indices for public authorities.

2. Although there are dozens of powers in the Identity Cards Act 2006 for features of the system to be altered by statutory instrument, it rests on a definition of identity that is only fulfilled by a file containing personal data about an individual, and on a registration function that consists in collecting and distributing such information. You could not build a national identity register according to the Birch model that would comply with the present law.

Guy Herbert
General Secretary, NO2ID

Common sense and hot air
1st October 2007

Too much discussion about climate change is stuck in unproductive strife between those who say it is a hoax and those who say we are heading for imminent catastrophe. Kevin Watkins's review of my new book, Cool It (October), is a case in point.

His chief concern is that I understate the problem. Let me be clear: the science unequivocally shows that climate change is real and it is caused by man. But predictions of destruction on an epic scale don't stack up.

In my book, I explore the impact of the most likely temperature increase over this century: the median estimate of a 2.6ºC rise reached by the UN climate panel (IPCC), whose estimates start at 1.8ºC and go up to 4ºC. This seems too low to Watkins, who accuses me of having a "cavalier approach to scientific evidence" and then only talks about a rise of the magnitude of 4ºC or 6ºC.

Similarly, Watkins is bothered by my reporting that the IPCC's estimates show that oceans will rise between 18-59cm, with the most likely scenario being around 30cm. That's similar to what the world experienced in the last 150 years. The planet—rather obviously—coped.

A further complaint is that I encourage readers to look only on the "bright side" of warming. I submit that looking at both the negative and positive impacts of climate change is reasonable. For example, by 2050, warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year. At the same time, 1.8m fewer people will die from cold.

Yes, we need to fix global warming. But I'm frustrated at our focus on policies that will not achieve this. In 1992, rich nations promised to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Instead, emissions grew by 12 per cent. In 1997, they promised to cut emissions some 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010. Despite this, it appears that emissions will increase by 20 per cent.

Proponents of command-and-control systems like Kyoto want us to spend a lot of money doing something that will make very little difference 100 years from now. This is why all peer-reviewed economic studies show that Kyoto-style policies are a poor way to help the world.

I believe a better answer is a dramatic increase in spending on research and development into low-carbon energy production. Every nation should commit to spending 0.05 per cent of GDP exploring non-carbon-emitting energy technologies. This would cost $25bn per year, which is seven times cheaper than the Kyoto protocol, yet a tenfold increase in current R&D spending. All nations would be involved, with the richer paying more.

Bjørn Lomborg
Copenhagen