Letters

With power swinging back to the Democrats in the US, it is time to impeach President Bush for taking America into a needless war in Iraq which, as Michael Lind points out (November), has left America severely weakened and caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering and loss of life. (Nearly 3,000 US soldiers, and 120 British, have died. And according to conservative estimates, about 55,000 Iraqis, military and civilian, have also perished.) The loss of respect for the most powerful nation on earth will damage us all.

The president's character is reflected in his administration. Woodrow Wilson was a great leader in war and peace, and without his intervention the first world war would have been settled in Germany's favour. Franklin Roosevelt, too, was a great reformer and war leader. John F Kennedy saw off the threat from Khrushchev in the Cuba crisis and averted the nuclear war that would have changed all our histories.

George W Bush, by contrast, incites war because he always threatens it. He invaded Iraq because Saddam had launched a failed assassination attempt against Bush's parents. Bush is weak and suffers the delusion that God is always on his side.

US presidents are usually liked. Even Clinton had many fans around the world. That changed when Bush Jnr won power. It is sad that a once respected nation should suffer such a decline in stature at the hands of this president.

Derek Coombs
Prospect chairman


How Irish are you?
2nd November 2006

We are told (November) that Julian Gough's parents are "so Irish they both have the right to be buried on the Rock of Cashel." This seems a most interesting right.

I am so Irish that I have never spent more than two consecutive weeks outside the country, and many of my ancestors never stirred beyond the island at all, yet I don't have this right to burial on the rock. Is some other qualification required, or is this just more mere Irishry in a foreign magazine? I think we should be told.

Hugo Brady Brown
Co Wicklow

Better than the Beatles?
30th October 2006

David Herman (November) refers to Howard Goodall's "splendid" Channel 4 series Twentieth Century Greats, which argued that the "great" music of the 20th century came from Broadway, the Beatles and film composers. Goodall, a superb presenter and illustrator at the piano, made an intriguing point, but absurdly overegged his conclusion. Are we seriously to accept that the greatest music of the 20th century was composed by Cole Porter and Lennon and McCartney over, say, Bartók's string quartets, Stravinsky's Les Noces and Schnittke's viola concerto? The latter is an interesting case, because Schnittke composed many film scores of the highest quality. But somehow I think that, if he were alive today, he would be appalled to think that the genre was being ranked above his other output. This is akin to preferring the music of Arthur Sullivan and Offenbach over that of Brahms and Mahler at the end of the 19th century: valid in strictly popular terms for its influence over the following few decades; ridiculous in any other context.

Charles Moberly
Umberleigh, Devon


Proms losing the plot
19th October 2006

Stephen Everson writes (September), "In a properly ordered world, Abbado and his orchestra would move on from Lucerne to make a triumphant visit to the Proms before they disband for the year." Well, they did move on somewhere else before disbanding—to Tokyo, thousands of miles away from Switzerland. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra and their conductor Claudio Abbado have just ended a nine-day residence at Suntory Hall, during which they gave ten orchestral and chamber concerts, including an absolutely shattering performance of Mahler's 6th symphony. So perhaps, in failing to attract "the world's most exciting orchestra" even for one concert, the Proms, "the world's greatest classical music festival," is beginning to lose some of its sheen?

Takefumi Enomoto
Tokyo

Out of the cradle
20th October 2006

In your Foreword (November), you state: "Secular humanism has conspicuously failed to create an alternative system of belief to organised religion, and in the process seems to have failed to give people sufficient reasons for having babies."

Excuse me for pointing out that this is untrue. The Russian visionary Tsiolkovsky put it best: "The earth is the cradle of mankind, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever."

Over the next decade or two, with renewed US interest in exploring the moon and a growing commercial passenger spaceflight industry, the worldview expressed in this well-known saying is likely to receive ever greater prominence.

Stephen Ashworth
British Interplanetary Society

Homicidal correction
19th October 2006

In Numbers Game (November), it is stated that "30 years ago, homicide rates were 12 times higher in America than in Britain, and they are now four times higher." Not so: they were 12 times and four times as high, which is different. They were 11 times and three times higher. The error can easily be seen if 12 per cent and 4 per cent are substituted; no one can think that "12 per cent as high" means the same as "12 per cent higher."

A common error, but none the more excusable for that.

Maurice Line
Harrogate


Analysing Hannibal
30th October 2006

I was intrigued to read in Jason Cowley's "Between the Lines" (November) that prior to Thomas Harris's third novel Hannibal, we had been given not even so much as a glimpse into the prehistory of Hannibal Lecter. But this is not accurate. In Red Dragon (the novel, not the excellent celluloid rendition, retitled Manhunter by Michael Mann) there are whole chapters in which we glimpse the horrific past that must surely have played a part in creating the celebrated monster. Perhaps this is what leads Will Graham in the original 1986 film to explain, "As a child my heart bleeds for him... but as an adult I think someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks."

Andrew Law
Edinburgh

Dubrovka victims
2nd November 2006

John Keane's "Moscow diary" (Prospect online, November) describes his visit to the Dubrovka theatre, where over 40 Chechens took the audience hostage in October 2002. The number of hostages who died in the aftermath is often quoted as 129, a number repeated by Keane.

However, last year Karina Moskalenko, the lawyer representing the families of the victims, announced that "at a minimum" 174 hostages had died. The actual number was almost certainly higher; the late Anna Politkovskaya quoted the figure of 200.

It is to be hoped that the Russian authorities soon issue a long overdue correction.

Jeremy Putley
Harrogate


Benn vs Easterly debate
6th November 2006

It is very much to be welcomed that a government minister is prepared to engage in debate (November) with one his most able critics. However, there is a fundamental flaw at the heart of Hilary Benn's argument about development aid.

Claiming that we "need to support rather than undermine local efforts" towards "better governance" implies a single view of these matters in recipient countries. Moreover, the minister's view that African countries have committed to better governance seems to suggest that stated intentions are as significant as actions.

The reality is surely more politically complex. Working within an externally imposed system of "nation states," few African leaders see their role as to govern in the interests of all. Rather they respond to the wishes of their ethnic or confessional constituents. Imposing democracy—which is partly what better governance is all about—exacerbates rather than ameliorates these trends.

In Uganda, for example, President Museveni, has for many years been fighting a rebel movement in the north of the country without success. Is it because he is unable to deal with the rebels while managing to send his army into the Democratic Republic of Congo? Or that he does not have the same commitment to the north as to other parts of Uganda? Can we expect President al-Bashir of Sudan to govern a country in the equal interests of his own and those of a different race and religion?

There is a huge tension within the current aid agenda. On the one hand it supports and tries to develop existing state structures; on the other it expects political leaders to act wholly against their own electorate and to support constituencies within those structures. As multiculturalism comes under increasing scrutiny in our relatively homogenous western societies, we seem to ignore the realities in far more diverse contexts. It may be that by insisting on democratic arrangements, we reinforce the politics of identity—with negative implications for everyone.

Graham Wood
Woking, Surrey

Cameron's big idea
2nd September 2006

David Cameron's big idea (September) won't get far if it is based on the fallacy that the political right is about individualism and the political left about the state. I grew up in a typical Tory household—where individualism was frowned on. What mattered were one's duties to various traditional social institutions: above all, to the nation, but also to the church, the class system (especially the royal family), the armed forces, various bodies of professional standards-maintenance such as the BMA, and, on a more personal level, to one's family and trusted friends.

Later in life, I met, and found an odd resonance with, people coming from the left, who also had a strong belief in institutional duty, though to a different set of institutions—usually governmental ones, whose role it was to counteract the perceived lack of justice in the existing order.

Perhaps more fun were the individualists I encountered—but these could be either "left" or "right." Ultimately, they believed in themselves, but if pushed would express loyalty to, and affection for, either the working class and various thinkers, artists or revolutionaries, or the free-market system and successful, buccaneering entrepreneurs. The idea that individualism equated with being "on the right" doesn't fit with my experience at all.

It's clearly impossible to map the complexities of political belief onto a one-dimensional left-right continuum. But I'm not sure turning the continuum into a triangle will solve that problem either. A two-by-three matrix might do the trick—with a kind of sliding scale between individualism and loyalism on one axis and tradition, the market and the state on the other—but no doubt many people will slip through that too.

Where should David Cameron place himself in this matrix? The rather bland answer is somewhere in the middle, balancing all these forces, preventing any from gaining the upper hand. This is part of an honourable conservative tradition. It's what Tony Blair was rather good at until he got too close to Washington. Maybe it's not a "big idea," but it's better than a big idea based on a fallacy.

Chris West
Meldreth, Cambridgeshire