No oil, no bin Laden
From Simon Courtauld
Sir: As an addendum to your excellent editorial (30 August) on the qualities of Sir Wilfred Thesiger and his hatred of the modern world, it is relevant to repeat what he said to me at the time of the US invasion of Afghanistan, and which I quoted in an article I wrote for The Spectator CA great crag of a man', 5 January 2002): 'If only oil had never been discovered in the Middle East, then the life that I knew might well have gone on unchanged, the Americans would not have interfered, and things would have been a lot better. We wouldn't have had bin Laden to worry about.'
You mention the influence on Thesiger of his reading Prester John as a boy. It was lifelong: not only were most of his heroes, as he said, blackor brown-skinned men, but in his later years he gave the name of Laputa, the rebel Zulu warrior in Buchan's novel, to the head of the Samburu family with whom he shared a house in northern Kenya. Thesiger did once tell me, however, that his great English warrior hero, a man who possessed 'the quality of nobility' — he was C-in-C Middle East when Thesiger served in the region with SOE and the SAS — was Sir Claude Auchinleck. Both men had an affinity with the Arab world: the Auk chose to spend the last 14 years of his life in Morocco.
Simon Courtauld
Pewsey, Wiltshire
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