Remembering Peter David

DURING his 28 years at The Economist Peter wrote on everything. His colleagues thought of him as a Middle East specialist above all, but he also wrote columns on British and in American politics, as well as stories and leaders on science and business. The 14 special reports he wrote ranged from Islam to banking and from Canada to South Africa. They included one on universities, which seems appropriate since he might have been mistaken for one.

Here, in our view, are some of the best things he wrote.

Peter on the opposition, from Newt Gingrich and others, to the proposed Cordoba centre in New York, from August 2010:

"The former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives may or may not have presidential pretensions, but he certainly has intellectual ones. That makes it impossible to excuse the mean spirit and scrambled logic of his assertion that “there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. Come again? Why hold the rights of Americans who happen to be Muslim hostage to the policy of a foreign country that happens also to be Muslim? To Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second. Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.

Mr Gingrich also objects to the centre’s name. Imam Feisal says he chose “Cordoba” in recollection of a time when the rest of Europe had sunk into the Dark Ages but Muslims, Jews and Christians created an oasis of art, culture and science. Mr Gingrich sees only a “deliberate insult”, a reminder of a period when Muslim conquerors ruled Spain. Like Mr bin Laden, Mr Gingrich is apparently still relitigating the victories and defeats of religious wars fought in Europe and the Middle East centuries ago. He should rejoin the modern world, before he does real harm." (From "Build that mosque".)

Peter's leader on the "hundred years' war" between the Arabs and Israel, from January 2009:

"The slaughter this week in Gaza, in which on one day alone some 40 civilians, many children, were killed in a single salvo of Israeli shells, will pour fresh poison into the brimming well of hate. But a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a people at all—at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the Middle East." (From "The hundred years' war".)

Peter's Bagehot column on the death of Alan Clark, a British politician, diarist and amoralist, from September 1999:

"As a romantic nationalist, former soldier and serious military historian, Alan Clark wanted to be defence secretary just as desperately as a little boy craves a train set. But not even Margaret Thatcher, whose “very pretty ankles” turned him on, and who liked him back, would risk putting the nuclear button near the finger of an habitual inebriate who said that Hitler was a military genius, who named one of his beloved dogs after Eva Braun, and who recommended sorting out Ireland’s “troubles” by sending British commandos one night to kill a couple of hundred IRA terrorists.

Mr Clark’s mad ideas and compulsive political incorrectness (he called Africa “bongo-bongo land”) kept him out of high office. He was not much good at low office. Life as a junior employment minister bored him silly." (From "Why they liked him".)

Peter's final word on post-occupation Iraq, from March 2007:

"It is not enough to say with the neocons that this was a good idea executed badly. Their own ideas are partly to blame. Too many people in Washington were fixated on proving an ideological point: that America's values were universal and would be digested effortlessly by people a world away. But plonking an American army in the heart of the Arab world was always a gamble. It demanded the highest seriousness and careful planning. Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld chose instead to send less than half the needed soldiers and gave no proper thought to the aftermath. 

What a waste. Most Iraqis rejoiced in the toppling of Saddam. They trooped in their millions to vote. What would Iraq be like now if America had approached its perilous, monumentally controversial undertaking with humility, honesty and courage? Thanks to the almost criminal negligence of Mr Bush's administration nobody, now, will ever know." (From "Mugged by reality: How it all went wrong".)

Peter's Bagehot column on a famous murder case in Britain, from April 2000 :

"All along, there has been a touch of Edgar Allen Poe about this story. Fred Barras and his accomplices had all of the isolated farmhouses in Norfolk to burgle. Some twist of fate directed them to “Bleak House”. It happens that its owner, Tony Martin, was not your typical farmer. He had, shall we say, a bit of a thing about burglars. On the night in question, as, it seems, on most nights, he had gone to bed fully clothed, boots on, with his illegal pump-action shotgun to hand. He kept rottweiler dogs in his garden and laid traps—man traps—around his house. Bagehot is no psychologist, but cannot help wondering whether, when Mr Martin heard Fred Barras and his friends breaking in, and headed down his booby-trapped stairs with his big gun, one part of him was thinking: “Make my day”. (From "Are you feeling lucky, punk?".)

Peter's leader on the justification for the first Gulf war, from January 1991:

Benjamin Franklin said there never was a good war, or a bad peace. He was half right. Nobody can be glad that, after the failure in Geneva, the stalemate in the Gulf seems this week to be slipping miserably into war. The result of all wars is men killed, maimed or made insane by horror. This time the horrors may include ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, even—if Iraq is foolish enough to lash out at Israel—nuclear ones too. Can any cause be great enough to justify the slaughter?

The answer is Yes. There is no good war, but sometimes a bad peace can be worse than war itself. A peace that left Saddam Hussein unchallenged in Kuwait would be trebly bad. It would mean sacrificing a high principle: no country has the right to over-run and annex another. It would mean abandoning a great interest: secure access to the oil of the Gulf, on which the prosperity of the whole world has come increasingly to depend. And, because of those two things, it would mean accepting a peace that was no peace at all, merely the lull before a bigger explosion. (From "Don't save this face".)

Peter's Lexington column on how Americans holiday, from August 2010:

"And yet neither affluence nor diversity seem to have made it as easy for Americans to relax on holiday in the way that guilt-free Europeans do. The American vacationer unable to silence his inner Puritan for those paltry 13 days a year must combine his holiday with some self-improving experience. Children are sent to camp to learn the Great Outdoors, or taught to fish or light fires by over-earnest fathers. Communing with history is another way to stiffen the laxity of a vacation: famous buildings, battlefields and landmarks are popular and lucrative draws. Not even Disney believes it can prosper by selling escapism alone. Hence its proposal for an American-history theme park outside Washington, DC (a scheme thwarted by the objections of local residents). And if the educational holiday fails, there is always the pilgrimage." (From "The air-conditioned Puritan".)

Peter's special reports since 2000*

Waking from its sleep: A special report on the Arab world (July 23rd 2009)

The revolution strikes back: A special report on Iran (July 21st 2007)

Peace, order and rocky government: A survey of Canada (December 3rd 2005)

In the name of Islam: A survey of Islam and the West (September 13th 2003)

*These long-form stories began to appear on Economist.com in 2000. To confuse readers, we used to call them "surveys". Peter wrote many surveys that, unfortunately, we cannot link to.  For the record, they were: "Undoing Britain?: A survey of Britain" (1999), "After Zionism: A survey of Israel" (1998), "The knowledge factory: A survey of universities" (1997), "Back on top?: A survey of American business" (1995), "At ease in Zion: A survey of Israel" (1994), "Recalled to life: A survey of internatinal banking" (1994), "The final lap: A survey of South Africa" (1993), "Out of joint: A survey of the Middle East" (1991), "Squeezed: A survey of the Arab world" (1990) and "Tribes with flags: A survey of the Arab East" (1988).