The Israel Factor
REUEL MARC GERECHT'S list of the Bush administration's four options regarding Iran's nuclear program ("The Struggle for the Middle East," Jan. 3 / Jan. 10) omits a critical variable: Israel.
If Israel was willing to take preemptive action against Iraq's nuclear program in 1981, it is also likely to do so against Iran's--eliminating Gerecht's first two options of essentially doing nothing. The advantage of Israel's threatening a preemptive strike is that it might persuade the Europeans to adopt a tougher stance against Iran.
If this tactic fails, I suspect the Bush administration will be faced with either taking preemptive action itself or watching Israel do so.
Michael D. Chan
Los Angeles, CA
Oh, Cynthia!
I HAVE LIVED IN Georgia's fourth congressional district for over 20 years, and I think Matthew Continetti's insistence that Cynthia McKinney is a "progressive"--or anticipating where progressives are going--is simply false ("Cynthia McKinney (D-Conspiracy)," Jan. 3 / Jan. 10).
I am a Democrat and a progressive. In 1996 I voted for McKinney's Republican opponent--the only time I have ever gone for a Republican in my 32 years of voting. One of my professors at Emory, a 69-year-old liberal Democrat, also cast his first Republican vote in that election. Ditto for a 76-year-old neighbor, who had voted Democratic since FDR.
In short, few of us who accept the label "progressive" either voted for or respect Cynthia McKinney.
Michael Stephen Hollifield
Atlanta, GA
MATTHEW CONTINETTI might be interested to know that with the exits of Zell Miller and Roy Barnes, Cynthia McKinney is now the most prominent and influential Democratic politician in Georgia. This helps explain why Republicans now control both U.S. Senate seats, the governor's office, and both houses of the state legislature.
If Atlanta TV stations keep showing McKinney's conspiracy-driven speeches, the Democrats will soon have about as much power in Georgia as they do in Utah.
William Bonner
Covington, GA
The Taiwan Two-Step
REGARDING GREG MASTEL'S "Taiwan Gets No Respect" (Dec. 27): While it might seem logical to assume that Taiwan would benefit more from increased trade with the United States than from increased trade with China, that is a decidedly short-term view.
Entrepreneurial growth has long proven conducive to the development of governments based upon individual freedom. Government-owned economies founder, as we saw in the Soviet Union. Economies that are micromanaged by a government whose primary goal is the socialistic leveling of wealth hinder their own industrial competitiveness, as many European economies prove.
Taken from that perspective, several interesting considerations arise relative to the PRC. First, the individual freedoms that existed in Hong Kong prior to the British turnover have impacted relationships between the Chinese and their government on the mainland. The effects have been neither as strong nor as swift as one might hope, but they are visible.
Anyone who visits the "new" China quickly notices the subcurrent that underlies the rapid growth of individual entrepreneurship. It cannot continue without political change. Eventually, the need to maintain industrial growth will force the Chinese government to accord rights to its citizens that it would prefer to deny. This will happen because a continued denial of those rights will eventually produce an economic decline that might topple the government.
Taiwan has the ability both to accelerate this process and to grow its own economy more substantially through greater trade ties to the PRC. Two factors are important. First, over the long term, mainland China will be a larger market for Taiwan than for the United States. Second, the assimilation of Taiwan into the greater Chinese government is probably inevitable. And the infusion of Taiwan's democracy into China's already strongly capitalistic economic structure will accelerate the growth of Chinese political freedom.
Jim Martin
Scotts Valley, CA