TODAY'S LETTERS: Readers Respond to Column About Bush Citing Graham Greene

By: E&P Staff Readers wrote in today about Editor-in-Chief Greg Mitchell's column about George Bush citing Graham Greene in his latest speech about Iraq.

**
Very well put, sir. That novel is also one of my personal favorites. Bush clearly never read it, and wouldn't "get it" if he had.

I read yesterday that Ed Gillespie put the words in Bush's mouth for the Decider's latest journey into incomprehension. Ed was so proud of his efforts that he furnished written copies of this blarney a day in advance to the press. Ed has never been the sharpest tack in the box. I can smell an invasion of Iran, can't you? 16 months to go. I don't think we're going to make it.

Bush translating Graham Greene, and at least 30% of the country believes the guy. Just ponder that. Damn - we really have sunk as a nation.

Gary Van Ess
Green Bay, Wisc.


I thought you might be interested to read the following bit from Fulbright's The Crippled Giant, the "anti-war Senator" quoted by Bush in his Vietnam speech. I've provided a more fulsome quotation than the one quoted by Bush--who, unsurprisingly, took it out of context.

The passage in question follows a detailed discussion of the geopolitical
consequences of a communist or non-communist government in South Vietnam. Fulbright concludes that, in the nuclear era, it makes no strategic difference to the United States what government is in power, so long as it's stable, kind to its citizens, and, at the very least, not overtly anti-American.

These two paragraphs, quoted in full, are from pages 92-93 of the first
edition of The Crippled Giant, 1972:

"Nor does it matter all that terribly to the inhabitants. At the risk of
being accused of every sin from racism to communism, I stress the
irrelevance of ideology to poor, peasant populations. Someday, perhaps, it will matter, in what one hopes will be a constructive and utilitarian way. But in the meantime, what earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers, in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they have never seen and may never even have heard of?

"At their current stage of undevelopment these populations have more basic requirements. They need governments which will provide medical services, education, birth control programs, fertilizer, high-yield seeds and instruction in how to use them. They need governments which are honest enough to refrain from robbing and exploiting them, purposeful enough to want to modernize their societies, and efficient enough to have some ideas about how to do it. Whether such governments are capitalist or socialist can be of little interest to the people involved, or to anyone except their incumbent rulers, whose perquisites are at stake, and their great-power mentors, fretting in their distant capitals about ideology and "spheres of interest."

Anthony Banks
Toronto, Ontario


We have truly reached a new low here in the abyss when we have our little King Bu$h making (incorrect)references to this great writer. Holy Christ, I know Mr. Greene is turning in his grave.

Ann K.


You write: "Estimates of the civilian death toll range from 100,000 to at least half a million." Close, by a factor of two.

The well-known Lancet study estimated the civilian death toll as 600,000 in July of 2006. A credible estimate based on what is knowable about civilian deaths since then is that the toll now stands at over 1 million, not half a million.

M. Barton Laws, Ph.D.
Senior Investigator in Social Science and Policy
Latin American Health Institute
Boston, Mass.