Correspondence
Correspondence WEASEL IN THE ART DEPT. THE COVER of the March 17 issue is J. incorrect. Someone has doctored the photos of the French and German foreign ministers and placed human heads where...
...BOB DUDOLEVITCH Springfield, VA IS THE U.N...
...White was bitterly and brilliantly opposed to the enshrining of national sovereignty in yet another international body intended to keep the peace...
...His analysis of the Daniel Liebskind design chosen for the World Trade Center site in Manhattan ("Faulty Towers," Mar...
...DAN WEINFELD New York, NY AMERICA'S ARAB PROBLEM CERTAINLY "France's Arab Problem" (Marc Ginsberg, Mar...
...ARUN KAPIL Saint-Maur-des-Fosses, France ESTRADA FILIBUSTER MAJOR GARRETT IS EITHER NAIVE or not aware of the strength of the Democrats' desire to trick the opposition when he writes in "Filibuster S^, Estrada No...
...17) that Democratic senator Harry Reid said "he will support Estrada if the papers are turned over and nothing objectionable emerges...
...His fresh, reasoned, accurate, and sound judgments are a highlight of the magazine...
...While his conclusion is understandably (and probably correctly) pessimistic for the likelihood of a distinguished solution here in New York, the only way that the results will be improved upon, however slightly, is for alternative voices to be heard...
...And it is awful...
...Some readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD might not realize the extent to which the design of public monuments is in the grip of an academic and arts establishment utterly dismissive of dissent or alternative viewpoints, despite their blather about "inclusiveness" and "healing...
...It has long been embraced by the public, despite being actively suppressed by the entrenched elite that now controls public taste...
...DAVID GELERNTER IS QUITE RIGHT to invoke the wise E.B...
...MAX FRANKEL New York, NY THE U.N...
...Benflis is a prominent personality in his own right, and it is not out of the question that he could challenge Bouteflika for the presidency in 2004...
...MICHAEL J. MCPHERSON New York, NY POSTMODERN MESS AT WTC ONE OF THE ASSETS OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD is its architecture critic, Catesby Leigh...
...Once evicted from office they all continued to play important roles in politics, often in opposition to the policies undertaken by their successors...
...That tradition is still alive...
...White for his arguments against the United Nations, but he does him a terrible injustice by calling him a warm and early supporter of that organization ("Replacing the United Nations," Mar...
...STEVEN W. SEMES New York, NY AL GORE HAS ONLY SAID ONE THING in his life that is accurate, and it had nothing to do with politics or policy...
...Why then does America ignore this obvious cautionary tale and continue to admit Arab-Muslim immigrants...
...If anything, I believe the Republicans have been too soft on Democrats in allowing them to get away with blocking this nomination...
...This was particularly true in the 1988-94 period, when successive prime ministers Kasdi Merbah, Mouloud Hamrouche, Sid Ahmed Ghozali, Belaid Abdesselam, and Reda Malek were prominent members of the ruling party, possessed an independent political base within and outside the power apparatus, and came into office with ambitious political projects of their own—which inevitably brought them into conflict with powerful, entrenched interests within the system...
...The current prime minister, Ali Benflis, who has served since 1999, does not have an openly conflictual relationship with President Bouteflika, but he is hardly a lackey of the latter...
...Public sentiment about the World Trade Center needs to find an appropriate expression, free from the narrow prescriptions of the modernist art and architecture elite...
...Gore once described postmodernism as "narcissism and nihilism...
...The votes would be recalculated annually, giving nations an incentive to expand liberty within their borders in order to move up on the Freedom House-type index and thereby garner more votes—and power—in the General Assembly...
...He had no illusions about the likelihood of such a world regime coming into being, but he hated to see the world fool itself into another League of inaction...
...The Security Council should be disbanded and the General Assembly should allocate votes based on the number of eligible voters in a particular nation modified by a neutral index such as the Freedom House list to distinguish "true democracy" from Iraq and Syria's parodies of democracy...
...But the Palestinian situation today, like that in Algeria, has its particularities, and Mahmoud Abbas is neither anonymous nor a "glorified functionary...
...BRENDA WALKER Berkeley, CA PRIME MINISTERS Robert Satloff's description of prime ministers in the Arab world in "The Prime Ministers Nobody Knows" (Mar...
...17) extends beyond Chirac's clumsy tap dance around Iraq to accrue additional power for his regime: The French must constantly placate the 20 percent of the nation's population that is now Muslim...
...But power realities in Algeria are such that the theoretically strong president has also not had total authority over this either, with military men controlling the security services and calling the shots from behind the scenes in regard to anti-Islamist counterinsur-gency...
...Clearly an institution where France can veto the will of the United States in the Security Council or where Syria has as much influence as India (actually, where it sits in the Security Council at all) is ludicrous...
...Does anyone seriously believe that Senators Schumer, Leahy, Clinton, Boxer, and even Reid won't take some innocent item in the papers and raise it as the most objectionable scandal they have ever seen...
...Next time get it right...
...Healing, it seems, will happen only when all of us adopt the views of the professional therapists/conceptual artists now in charge of such things, as evidenced by the Oklahoma City and Pentagon memorials...
...ISN'T NECESSARILY USELESS, but it's very flawed in its structure...
...The role of the prime minister is one...
...On the other hand, real healing, meaning deep reflection and reconciliation, is only likely to come about from expressions rooted in the central traditions of our art and culture, namely the classical, humanist tradition that inspired all the most beloved monuments of Washington, D.C., and elsewhere prior to the Second World War...
...Since the 1988 riots, which led to the end of the single-party system, Algeria has had a number of strong-willed, high-profile prime ministers who were the focus of the country's political life as much as the president under whom they served, if not more...
...Also, it should be noted that every solicitor general alive today— both Democrat and Republican—has said the internal memos should not be released...
...Libeskind's plan for the World Trade Center is both...
...One should wait and see before passing judgment on him and on this institutional reform in the PA...
...Civil unrest among that touchy group could bring on an unimaginable conflagration of terror and civil war...
...should be reorganized to reward those nations who practice true democracy and grant liberty to their people...
...17) is an excellent rebuttal of what is taken for conventional wisdom elsewhere...
...17) is for the most part accurate, though Algeria presents a partial exception...
...After all, America did not welcome Japanese tourists during WWII, or Nazi physics students either...
...Another is the fact—rather unusual for an Arab state— that two of its presidents in recent years (Ali Kafi and Lamine Zeroual) left office of their own volition, and the current one is by no means assured of serving a second term...
...They will seize on anything they can find to continue to hold up voting on this fine judicial candidate...
...But that was before political correctness decreed that rejecting likely enemies was unacceptable...
...I know this is the original photo because I saw it in the New York Post...
...Someone has doctored the photos of the French and German foreign ministers and placed human heads where weasel heads appeared in the original photo (see above...
...In regard to the Palestinian Authority, one may doubt the willingness of Arafat to cede real power to his newly appointed prime minister...
...Consequently, India, with hundreds of millions of voters, an independent judiciary, and a free press, would wield the highest number of votes in this General Assembly, while the group of guys running China would receive about one—the same number as Saudi Arabia, Syria, or North Korea, and fewer than Luxembourg...
...Leigh's criticism is an important contribution toward that end...
...The result is that we can no longer discern between generosity and self-destructive stupidity...
...STEVE NIKITAS Pittsfield, MA...
...In Algeria's institutionally strong presidential system, the prime minister does not deal with foreign affairs, defense, or internal security...
...Washington is whistling past the mosque if it thinks that repeating the mantra "Islam is a religion of peace" often enough will make it so...
...Algerian prime ministers have not been entrusted with fighting "Islamist vigilantes" and have not had the authority to weigh in on this particular matter...
...If you look up his wonderful but anonymous lead editorials in The New Yorker from the 1940s (some of them collected in a book called The Wild Flag) you will find that he predicted the U.N.'s inability to function as a mere confederation of nations, without reliable access to the people of the world, without the ability to raise and pay for peacekeepers, and to form transnational coalitions that looked past the parochial interests of nation-states...
...Algeria is hardly a full-fledged liberal democracy—and is not likely to become one any time soon—but does deviate from the political norm in the Arab world in a number of respects...
...He believed that only some type of true world government, with a democratic legislature and judiciary, could ever control nuclear weapons and keep the peace...
...USELESS...
...Instead of being dismantled, the U.N...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 28
