Time will tell
The war has started and will soon be over. The dictator Saddam will be gone. Bush said that the war is to disarm Iraq and remove all chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Once Iraq is subdued, he will have achieved this end.
But in the process, Bush has made billions of people mad at him. Like battling the sorcerer's apprentice, smashing one danger may only create tens, hundreds, thousands, millions more angry Muslims and Arabs. The most important resource terrorists have is anger, and anger can only be created by their enemy. Without anger, terrorists do nothing.
If Bush is sincere in his wish to avoid future terrorism, he must stop when he has won and completely turn over Iraq to the UN or another neutral body to assist them to become a democracy. Bush should support Iraq's recovery with money only, not troops or administration.
Once the world sees that Bush was honest, that he has left Iraq after achieving his stated goal, only then will it grudgingly conclude that the US did the best thing and begin to believe again in US morality. But if the US stays in Iraq and takes all the contracts for US companies, then the world will realize that Bush's ideal is not democracy, but oil, and that his God is not Jesus Christ, but Mammon.
Tom A. Trottier
Ottawa, Canada
War is always a terrible thing. Equally terrible is the massacre of innocent civilians by a corrupt governing authority. Nobody can disagree that the regime of Saddam Hussein has performed monstrous and horrible acts against his own people, the soldiers of Iran and the civilians of Kuwait. How long can today's anti-war protesters wave their placards and shout 1960s slogans for peace, reliving their youthful days when it was hip to protest against Big Brother, while ignoring their own hypocrisy in not having been on the streets protesting a decade ago when Iraq invaded Kuwait. And where was their devotion to peace, justice and human rights when new reports of human rights violations in Iraq trickled out slowly but regularly?
More appropriate are the anti-war actions of the Buddhist Tzu Chi (慈濟) organization, which is sending supplies to help those fleeing the mayhem of the invasion. The Buddhist organization is offering real and positive action to help Iraqis and Kurds, rather than engaging in trendy and hypocritical media events that involve chanting and the burning of passports that serve as a thin veneer to hide a deeper anti-Americanism and jealousy for American power. My personal congratulations to President Chen Shui-bian (
Let us hope that the American intervention will help the Iraqi people achieve the same sense of liberty and democracy that Taiwan enjoys, and let us pray that their personal losses will be miraculously few.
Timothy Hu
Taipei
Referendums, no big deal
I don't understand your legislature's problem with referendums. The voters here in the US face as many as four referendums each vote, even in primaries. Here, even at the rural town level, it only takes 2 percent of the local registered voters to petition the election commission to include a referendum on the ballot. We vote on changes in law, taxes, projects and other issues. Our legislators are not afraid of the people's voice in matters of governance. It is time for the people of Taiwan to demand the right to referendum. Let the people be heard. The people should not be afraid of their own power.
Bode Bliss
Cleveland, Ohio
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs