Dear Editor
Dear Editor The Gulf Barry Rubin, reviewing J.B. Kelly's Arabia, the Gulf and the West, ("Imperial Scorn," NL, October 20) finds the author too "pugnacious" and his indictments of the Persian Gulf...
...Kelly's Arabia, the Gulf and the West, ("Imperial Scorn," NL, October 20) finds the author too "pugnacious" and his indictments of the Persian Gulf regimes "unremitting" and "strident...
...Recognition of those melancholy facts could then prompt the politicians to exercise real control and begin channeling their weapons engineers' talents into more socially useful pursuits...
...Baltimore...
...New York City Philip Hutttnger Nabokov Daphne Merkin is wrong to find Nabokov's uncovering of an equine theme in Madame Bovary "a bit zealous" ("Writers and Writing," NL, October 20...
...but baiting Seoul with Pyongyang is an invitation to disaster...
...Tempting the North and teasing the South in this manner could induce moderation in each of the Korean States...
...If Rubin doesn't regard this as prima facie evidence of "Arab/ Islamic fanaticism, irrationality and bankruptcy," we can only conclude that he too has been taken in by the romantic school of Arab "apologists...
...But Hopkins completely misses the point about the efforts to negotiate mutual limitations on strategic nuclear weapons...
...Given Rubin's inability to refute any major portion of Kelly's thesis, these pejoratives appear merely to reflect the reviewer's academic squeamishness about calling a spade a spade...
...Merkin herself might have benefited from a little more zeal...
...The politicians on both sides may also come to see that arms expenditures have become so costly that they are undermining the social and economic fabric of their respective societies...
...This does not rule out the economic pressure Olsen urges, nor does it mean that we should turn our backs while Chun Doo Hwan and his gang of thugs ignore the human rights of South Koreans...
...Had she gotten caught up in the spirit animating Lectures on Literature, she might have remembered Nabokov's insistence that a great novel lives in such seemingly obscure details...
...He says that North Korea is on the lookout for an opening in the South, and that the breakdown of detente whets the Communists' incentive for military adventurism...
...She says of Nabokov, "If you are wily and piteous, as Humbert Humbert and Pale Fire's John Shade are, he will sing for you," when the character from Pale Fire most fitting, she would surely agree upon reflection, would be Doctor Charles Kinbote, the demented narrator...
...Nabokov's energetic unravelling of each strand in Flaubert's novel is the most appropriate response to a work in which every word counts...
...There can be no substitute for a principled stand in South Korea...
...He also points out that "threats to abandon the South could be misread in Pyongyang and trigger a drive for unification by military means...
...But then he goes on to suggest: "It would probably be constructive for Washington and Tokyo to let both Seoul and Pyongyang know that North Korean restraint would be viewed very favorably, and even rewarded with improved ties...
...New York City William Clark Arms Control The ingenious arms designers are constantly leaping ahead of the arms controllers, Mark Hopkins tells us ("Our New Euromissiles and Theirs," NL, October 6), implying that arms control treaties don't work and all we are left with to stave off a nuclear holocaust is that old standby?the balance of terror...
...What Olsen does not consider is the possibility that any overture to Pyongyang on the part of the West would be deemed a carte blanche to invade the South, no matter how cordial our ties with Seoul are...
...Some of his policy prescriptions, however, are ill-advised ("Dealing with South Korea's New Dictatorship," NL, October 20...
...Gary Brock...
...The foolish wish that the United States can be everyone's friend has bedeviled our relations with both Chinas, with Israel and Egypt, and with India and Pakistan...
...By playing one side off against the other, we risk having two determined enemies instead of just one...
...Boston Howard Kaplan Danger in Korea Edward A. Olsen is quite right that the American preoccupation with Iran has obscured the significance of the present mare's nest in South Korea...
...What better proof can anyone require of Kelly's accurate assessments of these regimes, and of the bankruptcy of American policy in the region, than the current Iran-Iraq war...
...This process, however flawed, at least forces Soviet and American leaders to acknowledge that both sides have enough missiles and bombs to destroy each other many times over, and that further attempts to gain marginal advantage are useless and destabilizing...
Vol. 63 • November 1980 • No. 20
