Peace Plea: Delusion, Fallacy or Perfect Sense?

Re “No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak,” Opinion, Oct. 14:

Barbara Kingsolver argues that dumping a “few billion dollars into food, health care and education” in terrorist lands will buy cooperation and peace. Let me remind her that, in Egypt alone, since 1978, the U.S. has dumped billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid. From this benevolence we reaped the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a violently anti-American terrorist group that recently merged into Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.

It is a common fallacy that unmet need, not evil, is the root cause of terrorism. And so Kingsolver pleads with us to “understand, then alter the forces that generate hatred.” Let me ask her a fair question: What exactly would you like to understand about the incalculable evil that would shred thousands of innocents in the wreckage of two U.S. embassies, the Cole, four civilian airliners, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center?

Steven De Salvo

Los Angeles

*

I would like Kingsolver to know that she is not alone, not the only one waving that ridiculous little flag of hope. Thank you, dear lady, for “pleading against this madness” and knowing the harassment to come from a reportedly 90% majority favoring the madness.

Richard J. Dovgin

Santa Barbara

*

Kingsolver’s piece makes the easy error of equating individual behavior and norms with those of nations. She personifies Marc Cooper’s observation in Opinion on the same day that the left knows how to scold, not how to think. Nations are not innocent until proven guilty by lawyers. Acts of war are not playground scuffles. And the World Court does not pursue villains that are whole cultures.

Gregory Benford

Laguna Beach

*

Kingsolver’s article is the first piece I have read that made perfect sense. It appears to me that President Bush and his people are doing just what has come to be expected of the U.S. So very predictable and deadly. How foolish just to add more reasons for another attack, when we can learn from the history of terrorism that you can’t bomb it away. We, as women, must be heard, for our lives and those of our children, all innocents, are on the line because these foolhardy men make up the rules.

Sharon Zminda

Los Angeles

*

I don’t know which of Kingsolver’s ideas is more delusional, hauling Osama before the World Court or installing a Paris-style Metro system in Tucson, but it is easy to tell which is the more dangerous. She has become her most repellent fictional character, Nathan Price, the minister whose zeal led him to dismiss the danger he was placing his family in, until his family was destroyed (“The Poisonwood Bible”). Kingsolver dismisses the terrorists. She believes that the Florida election board, U.S. corporations and fossil-fuel emissions are the real dangers to the world. And in her zeal she is ready to sacrifice the rest of us to the real dangers.

William Baugh

San Diego