A pretty damning peer review report and a harbourmaster's assessment are also available on the website and for public viewing.
CAROL WEBB
Whanganui
Arabia Felix
Although I enjoyed meandering through Fred Frederikse's article (Chronicle, June 20), there are five points I would like to make:
1. He omitted to mention that Arabia, during Roman times was known as Arabia Felix because then it was a fertile land with wadis and rivers before desertification took its toll.
2. He forgot to mention that the Saudis overthrew the Hashemites, guardians of the holy places Mecca and Medina and ruled the Arabian Peninsula.
3. In 1914, the British promised the Hashemites full Arab independence if they rebelled against their Ottoman suzerain, hence the Great Arab Revolt famously led by Lawrence of Arabia and his Arab allies. In the Treaty of Locarno in 1923, the Arabs were denied independence as England and France carved the Ottoman Empire into zones of influence. I refer you to James Barr's seminal book A Line In The Sand (2011), an account that shaped the Middle East.
The British wanted to open another front from the south aside from the Western Front, to the astonishment of the French.
4. Having made promises to the Arabs, Admiralty Lord Winston Churchill, by a stroke of a pen, gave the kingdom of Iraq to Faisal I, a Hashemite, created Transjordan and truncated the West Bank and gave it to Hussein, the other Hashemite brother. The British never intended granting independence to the Arabs and instead created "mandated" territories.
5. By the way, Bahrain is the dual form plural of "sea", loosely translated as "two seas".
Any scholar of Arabic will tell you that the word for sea is simply BAHR.
LEON BENBARUK
Whanganui
God's protection
It is a peculiar sight, Christians going to bat for those who exist, as a group, specifically, obdurately, intentionally and as a matter of their own self-identification, in rejection of the New Covenant, and are as such explicitly anti-Christ (one wonders why He even bothered).
Nevertheless, Mandy Donne-Lee (June 26) believes the state known as Israel owes its existence to divine intervention, in lieu of typically more mundane historical causes, such as coalitions of ill-prepared or quite simply incompetent adversaries, and a brutality in war that allows for the murder of prisoners of war and civilians.
Indeed, less than a decade before the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, another nation was locked in total war against the combined might of the best the world had to offer, all the while running an horribly efficient network of death camps that beggars belief to this day.
I posit to Mandy, with the knowledge that history is full of grisly wartime feats against superficially unlikely odds, that the results of the war for Israel's independence are no more God protecting His Chosen than the Shoah was His divine retribution for machinations against Christian Germany prior to World War II.
NICK ANDER
Springvale
Culvert delays
Re the WDC annual plan, (Chronicle, June 20):
As a ratepayer of both WDC and Horizons rates, I find it total arrogance that these two authorities to whom we pay compulsory contributions cannot get off their corporate backsides and share the cost of the Onetere Drive culvert and just do it.
Money has been spent on heaps of billboards proclaiming "Why drive south to fly north?" when the next major flood will leave us no option.
No one, including Air Wanganui Ambulance people and patients, will get to the airport, and the highway south to Marybank will again be a no-go.
A new velodrome roof will not solve either of these probabilities.
Oh, that's right, there is a lot more kudos and glamour in a velodrome roof than a plain old culvert, which will only prevent flooding and keep two highways open.
So the council gives itself a bouquet for a roof for the freeloaders -- and hopes that, in the next 12 months, the people on Onetere Drive don't suffer another flood -- and, of course, some mutual backslapping for a 2 per cent rate rise.
Enough said. Any further comment would be unprintable.
A BARRON
Aramoho
