Lessons of the past continue to instruct
Re “History, democracy and Iraq,” Opinion, Dec. 19
According to history professor Niall Ferguson, “many glib commentators like to blame all the problems of the Middle East today on British and French imperial maneuvers ... as if malicious European diplomats somehow ... willfully encouraged Jewish settlers to colonize Palestine.” But that’s exactly what happened.
Per Sir Ronald Storrs [in his 1937 memoir “Orientations”], the first governor of Jerusalem under British rule, the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine “blessed him that gave as well as him that took, by forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”
TOM PAYNE
Riverside
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In support of Ferguson’s warning that fledgling democracies, after throwing off the yoke of occupation, often devolve into brutal civil wars, I would point out that we live in a country that did exactly that.
ROBERT GROSS
Long Beach
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One hundred million dollars for cancer research (“U.S. to Begin Mapping Cancerous Tumor Cells,” Dec. 14) and $100 billion for war (Dec. 14).
Well, I guess in its own way, war cures cancer.
DAVID M. SHERR
Santa Monica
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