Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘Living in a Closet’
As I waited for the subway after reading Mr.X’s article about the difficulties of being a Republican on the Upper West Side, I began composing a reply in my head [“Living in a Closet,” Opinion, September 8, 2004]. However, the train came and I forgot all about it. Reading the responses to Mr. X in a subsequent issue reminded me that I wanted to put in my two cents’ worth [“Mr. X-Files – You Are Not Alone,” Letters, September 15].
What I’ve become aware of since the election of 2000 is that it requires no effort at all to be a Democrat in New York City. It’s the default, and, if you’re at all likeable, it’s assumed that you agree with such well thought-out opinions as “Anyone but Bush” or “Bush is an idiot.” These phrases are spouted by my apparently intelligent neighbors and even by some of my friends, who smugly believe that we here in the big city know better than those less-astute red-staters.
Well, I guess there are some reds among the blues on the Upper West Side. So Mr. X, why don’t you make it your job to get us together with, perhaps, the help of The New York Sun? One of the people who wrote to the Sun said that she and her husband have “honed their arguments” and I could certainly use some honing help.
It’s too easy to get emotional or angry and then start sounding like some of the demonstrators who checked their brains at the door during the Republican National Convention. I would heave such a sigh of relief to meet people who didn’t seriously praise Michael Moore’s movie, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and who make an effort to be informed and rational.
KATHERINE RICHARDSON
Manhattan
‘An Israeli Civil War’
The New York Sun’s editorial raising the question of a civil war in Israel is deep in sympathy but shallow in history [“An Israeli Civil War,” September 16, 2004]. Otherwise the Sun would know:
(1) Prime Minister Sharon is derided as a hard-liner by Arabs and the left because they will criticize Israel and demand more concessions, no matter how appeasement minded he has become.
(2) His undemocratically bulldozed scheme to give the active enemy, in stages, what would be Israel’s secure borders, a third of its water supply, and the religious and historical core of the Jewish homeland is not “pragmatic.”
(3) There are no security reasons for that concession to terrorism, and his excuses for it are unconvincing. He would greatly encourage the jihadists.
(4) Mr. Sharon’s alarm about a civil war is the establishment way of discrediting the whole opposition. The same was done by Shimon Peres, who had agents provocateurs perpetrate violence, and then blamed the “incitement” on the right and the religious.
(5) Menachem Begin was distributing 90% of the Altalena’s military cargo to the Haganah, into which he was folding his men. The rest was for an attempt to liberate the Old City. Not wanting the right-wing Begin to get credit for saving Israel, David Ben-Gurion had Yitzhak Rabin shell the Altalena and murder volunteer soldiers who had jumped off the burning ship.
RICHARD H. SHULMAN
Manhattan
Iran Dead Ahead
William F. Buckley Jr. is right in highlighting the dangers posed by a terrorist theocracy in Iran, but endorsing Mark Helprin’s overwhelming military response is unlikely to get the job done [“Iran Dead Ahead in Middle East,” Opinion, September 16, 2004].
To date, none of the experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency or outside have been able to definitively identify all of Iran’s surreptitious nuclear programs nor their level of completion. Further, a military response presumes the ability to take out that country’s weapons of mass destruction before they can be used against allies like Israel and faux allies such as Saudi Arabia. That is a tall order, since the Iranians are said to have been ready for a strike from the mid-1990s and have spread their program around various sites.
There is probably not a single solution to the nuclear menace from Iran, but looking at the history of their program could offer some pointers. For starters, the two principal players in Iran’s nuclear skullduggery are Russia and Pakistan.
While Russia has always in sisted that its support of the Iranian nuclear program was for peaceful purposes, Minatom, the Russian agency dealing with nuclear technology transfers, has lately admitted that the Iranians in fact have a nuclear weapons program.
Concerted and immediate economic pressure on the Russians and on Minatom in particular is likely to stay further cooperation with Iran.
In the case of Pakistan, the entire effort has been clandestine and is supposed to have stopped, with the government there making the incredulous assertion that it was the work of a “rogue” scientist.
Mr. Buckley is once again right in noting that immediate concerns diminish the possibility of such pressures, but it is unlikely that will prevail for long.
For both Russia and Pakistan, American options to thwart the making of an Iranian bomb remain open and are likely to be exercised in the aftermath of November’s presidential election.
Separately, Mr. Buckley also seems to have magnified the casualties resulting from a small pox-based terrorist attack. The Department of Homeland Security’s Web site offers an explanation of and remedies for a terrorist-based small pox infection.
While obviously devastating, there appears to be an extremely low probability of millions dying as a consequence.
VIJAY DANDAPANI
Manhattan
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