Rather than bore readers with another rebuttal to Peter Vale, those alarmed by his denigration of the success of South African relations with the United States might consider enrolling in Wits Plus, our university’s programme of evening study for busy people.
Courses may not yield simple or easy answers to international challenges facing the nation, but neither will they hear claims such as Vale’s that “the real tragedy of our times is the United States failed to construct a language of global politics”.
The war against terror surely requires a new grammar, but Vale’s gratuitous complaining that leaders fail to warn us of their inadequacies, obscures the challenge to deal with the logic of intolerance that breeds terrorism. John Stremlau, Wits University