Correspondence
Correspondence DETERRENCE RECONSIDERED IN HIS EXCELLENT ARTICLE "The Obsolescence of Deterrence" (Dec. 9) Charles Krauthammer fails, I believe, to bring out a very important point. In the...
...It does not matter how many weapons we have if our enemies are convinced that we will not use them...
...Administrators, professors, and students spent more time talking about diversity and cultural sensitivity than about any other subject...
...I wholeheartedly agree with all his points regarding the Clean Elections Act, but must add that he omitted mentioning another major contributing factor in the November election results...
...2) about the recent election fiasco in Arizona, which I experienced as a GOP activist and volunteer for Matt Salmon...
...It also seems clear, based on the recent shillyshallying at the United Nations, that it will not succeed regularly, since few of our allies are willing to place their economic interests in a position that is secondary to their strategic ones...
...The rest of the moms in my moms group watch The Bachelor and wouldn't even recognize Dick Cheney...
...MARK LASSWELL New York, NY ANGRY WHITE MALE MY HAT GOES OFF to Heather Mac Donald for writing "Dartmouth Does Diversity" (Dec...
...Try being the only informed person you know...
...9) and just had to reply...
...On behalf of myself and my son Rasheed and daughter Amjad who were both kidnapped and held away from me for five years and abused, I want to thank Congressman Burton and his hardworking staff for showing these lost citizens of our great country that they are not forgotten...
...In the mind of my professor, I had betrayed her by inexplicably metamorphosing from a noble stutterer into a dangerous "angry, white male...
...While I agree with Krauthammer's premises and many of his conclusions, I think that preemption as an option will have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and will likely be rejected in most instances, just as we are rejecting it in the case of Korea now...
...The Weekly Standard regrets the error...
...Recall that part of bin Laden's analysis rested on the perception that America was a paper tiger: It bugged out of Vietnam, it stood around befuddled while an Iranian rabble imprisoned scores of diplomatic and military personnel for a year and a half, it fled from Lebanon after attacks on diplomatic and military targets, it was unwilling to take casualties in Mogadishu or in the last war against Iraq, and it was fairly desultory in its responses to the first World Trade Center bombing, the African embassy bombings, and the USS Cole bombing...
...Inherent in this view is the assumption that we can or will implement a policy of preemption where WMD are acquired...
...She assumed I would be her natural ally in her daily tirades against the establishment, treatment of minorities, women, gays, and, of course, the handicapped...
...God bless you...
...SUZANNE H. JAMISON Tucson, AZ CHIVALRY OR CONTRACT...
...Both Rasheed and Amjad were impressed by the humanity of Dan Burton...
...Two failed and one passed, but the main effect of the propositions was that they got the populations on all of our numerous reservations out voting in force...
...Swift, effective military action removing, replacing, and (hopefully) punishing Saddam Hussein would go a long way toward creating conditions for deterrence to be effective once again...
...At least 18 countries that possessed or very nearly acquired nuclear weapons in the past have now voluntarily forsworn possession...
...There were three propositions on the ballot involved with different aspects of Indian gaming in Arizona...
...GERARDO JOFFE San Francisco, CA IN ORDER FOR DETERRENCE TO WORK, those whom one would deter must actually believe that unacceptable consequences would befall them if they were to act...
...I named him as Truman's ghost in Spy magazine in 1988, in an article called "People Who Need People...
...I am a stay-at-home mom whose best friend is the local radio guy, Hoppy...
...Deterrence will remain in the arsenal and, as with most problems, how to deal with nations who acquire WMD remains complex and not amenable to solution by the application of easily stated principles, such as those Krauthammer submits...
...The real mystery is why Bain is so coy about identifying the well-known author whose work he authors so well...
...First of all, spare me the lament of how horrible it is to be informed...
...I have stopped watching the Sunday shows since Brinkley left, but always catch the highlights on Rush...
...A preemptive doctrine is not an indictment of Kissinger, but is rather a substitution for missile defense...
...The Muslims, as demonstrated by the suicide bombers in Israel, obviously do not hesitate to sacrifice themselves in order to achieve their political goals...
...While enrolled in an undergraduate program in a San Francisco university in the early nineties, I observed firsthand what Mac Donald writes about...
...Proponents of the three propositions had significant registration drives and worked hard to get out the vote throughout the campaign...
...Welcome to my world...
...At least you get paid to pay attention...
...I have never even met him...
...And the absorption of deterrence by the antiwar movement today is no more hypocritical than Reagan's defense initiative was in the 1980s...
...As threats change, so too do the methods for dealing with them...
...Class discussions regularly turned into precarious voyages through "mine-fields" as professors tried to steer us away from hot topics...
...In his attempt to simplify and debase the antiwar movement, the author overlooks three critical points...
...We failed to get out our voters and they succeeded...
...Finally, the author brands the idea of unilateral disarmament during the Cold War as a "disastrous" solution...
...But mustering support for such action takes an extraordinary effort, the kind that cannot be undertaken regularly or for that matter economically...
...He represents the best that a free and truly democratic country stands for—he took up a difficult and risky cause...
...Only chival-ry—and possibly a contract clause— could explain why Bain still clings to his sheet...
...MARY JANE WOOD Morgantown, WV RESERVATIONS ABOUT AZ THANKS FOR THE LARGELY EXCELLENT "Fundraising Arizona" by Clint Bolick (Dec...
...JON L. BREEN IS JUSTIFIED in suspecting that Donald Bain is the ghostwriter behind Margaret Truman's mystery series ("The Ghost and Miss Truman," Nov...
...If this had only happened five years ago, we would be safe back home and my children would have gotten the best free education in the world...
...Second, the psychological impact of a deterrent strategy, which translates into leverage for both the rival state and antiwar movement, has manifested today only as a result of careful policy linkage between Hussein's regime and a spontaneous network of terrorists...
...MIKE BELENKY San Francisco, CA BURTON AND THE SAUDIS I JUST READ DAVID TELL'S "Sultan of Spin" (Dec...
...The canvass shows a record vote on the reservations...
...Tell is right on target when he describes Burton and his determination to come to the aid of kidnapped American citizens...
...In our present conflict with the Muslim world, that is not the case, and it would be a fatal error not to recognize it...
...The fact that Hussein declined to use chemical and biological agents in the Gulf War seems unimportant...
...Charles Krauthammer leaves implicit a critical point that I believe should be explicit in "The Obsolescence of Deterrence...
...Each of these nations enjoys a peaceful existence and is presently more afflicted by government corruption than the threat of nuclear war...
...RICHARD LEVINE San Francisco, CA CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER'S ARTICLE brands so-called "Cold War nostalgia" as a misguided public sentiment predicated on a highly selective memory...
...Deterrence may yet be an effective self-defense tool, but we need to convince actual and prospective enemies that (1) we have the will to strike and (2) when we do, the impact upon them will be fearsome...
...My experience came to a climax when one of my professors, upon finding out I had a mild stutter, decided I would complete the diversity makeup of her class by representing the "handicapped...
...Combined with a somewhat exhausted and divided Republican party, plus the lack of funds, the propositions may have been what tipped the balance...
...JORDAN GOTTFRIED Charlottesville, VA CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER'S cogent analysis of deterrence weakens at the end of the article where he argues that overthrowing Saddam for his refusal to relinquish WMD would be a clear demonstration to other dictators that in acquiring them "they purchase extinction" and will not only be disarmed but dethroned...
...All the while, malleable students competed with one another in defending the "ill-treated...
...In the long-lasting and very bitter Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, both sides worked on the reasonable assumption that their opponents were sane, rational, and not self-destructive...
...Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to expect that, say, somebody like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi would be willing to sacrifice a few million of his own people in order to attain his political objective, such as the destruction of Israel...
...The interesting part came when I started to openly disagree with her...
...MONICA STOWERS Riyadh, Saudi Arabia CORRECTION:Monica Stowers was mistakenly identified as Monica Powers in our editorial last week...
...Within a matter of days, I became the class pariah and was ostracized...
...Squishy as it may sound, we will have to use a range of responses from diplomatic and commercial sanctions to restrictions on travel and exchanges...
...DAVID M. LIPTON Boston, MA PEDICURE POLITICS AS I WAS GETTING A PEDICURE so I could wear my strappy sandals to the ball, I was reading "The Other Nine-Tenths" by Fred Barnes (Dec...
...The Republicans still have six of eight Republican congressmen and the legislature is Republican, as are most statewide offices, but Clean Elections with the special interest vote and the turnout on the reservations lost the governorship for the Republican party...
...16) about Congressman Burton and his meeting with my daughter, Amjad...
...First, Saddam Hussein has never threatened to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States, but in the event he does, there is still no precedent for the failure of nuclear deterrence—except perhaps with Israel's restraint from retaliating against SCUD missile attacks in 1991...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 15
