Today’s woes would test even ‘statesman’ Bunche

Re “Where have you gone, Ralph Bunche?” Opinion, Aug. 2

Erin Aubry Kaplan does a disservice to the memory of diplomat Ralph Bunche by declaring that he would have opposed America’s use of its military against the Islamo-fascist threat except as a last resort.

According to Sir Brian Urquhart, in his 1996 interview with UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies, Bunche in the 1930s was obsessed with Hitler’s threat to civilization. He had actually read “Mein Kampf” and understood that it wasn’t just the Jews who were threatened racially. Bunche spent a great deal of time trying to arouse American consciousness of the Nazi threat and strongly advocated America’s prosecution of the war. Bunche was a peacemaker, but he also understood the existential threat of an evil philosophy that targets “the other” as subhuman, and he advocated the most destructive of wars to oppose it -- something that doesn’t come across in Kaplan’s caricature of him.

BILL SMITH

Irvine

*

This is not to discredit Bunche’s achievements in his efforts to maintain a peaceful society in his time. In fact, Bunche personifies Webster’s definition of the word “statesman.” Unfortunately, with a reverence for the United States diminished and the enemies of freedom becoming stronger and more brazen, we now live in a world in which his formulas for peace would be virtually unworkable. Both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have done the best they can with what they have had to work with. I don’t know of anyone, including Bunche, who could solve the problems we now face.

ALAN LINSKY

Beverly Hills