China to learn pre-emption
Chin Heng-wei (
Analyzing the initial strategy of the allied forces in the war on Iraq Lin draws the conclusion that "One important lesson to be learned by Taiwan from the US-Iraq war should be that of the need to protect and strengthen Taiwan's policy-making and command centers."
If I am not mistaken, this conclusion can only be based on the explicit or implicit understanding that the US is actually setting a precedence. Tearing down the however fragile and imperfect construction of international law and multilateral institutions to replace it with American unilateralism, pre-emptive action and temporal coalitions that are defined by short term objectives, the US might just be about to open Pandora's box. The box has been filled to the brim since World War II. During the Cold War the two major opponents used it's weight to prevent the other side from opening it. And eventually the international community managed to attach a few locks to the box, some stronger, some weaker. Now we are witnessing the locks being broken deliberately.
A spread of the strategy to decapitate the enemy by surgical strikes, as feared by Lin, might be one of the smallest perils to escape from the box. Adding a nuclear pre-emptive action -- an action the US has reserved for itself -- gives a better impression of the big picture. It's a group picture, and China will be in it.
Torsten Nohl
Fengyuan
The US has might and is right
Despite massive worldwide anti-war demonstrations and strong dissensions of some leading countries, the US -- with open support of only Britain and Spain -- has given Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a fateful ultimatum which he has rejected.
For the first time, the superpower of the world is acting in seeming defiance and at the risk of alienating the apparent majority of the world. Why is the US doing this? Many motives have been impugned upon US President George W. Bush for his Iraq policy, usually for national and personal interests. Whether they are valid or not is not the important question. For the courage, steadfastness, clarity and depth of his convictions come from a much more fundamental source, namely the character of American history and society.
It is this character that has made America the super-power of the world. Its military and economic might are the appliances of its moral and spiritual character. The character of American society, its government, its different races and religions, its democracy, are rooted and nurtured by its respect for the human person. It has not been a perfect society, but there never has been any better. In 200 years it has become the greatest power the world has ever seen.
This war on Iraq is not of America's making but thrust upon it. This greatest democratic power in the world has been attacked by ultra-conventional methods of war -- using civilian, not military, methods of destruction. Democracy itself was under attack, not just the US. Nor does the source of this attack have any national boundary.
Then US president Woodrow Wilson led America to join World War I "to make the world safe for democracy." He initiated the League of Nations for this purpose. The League failed; the US did not join it. It was disunited, and World War II followed. British Prime Minister Tony Blair sees the historical parallel today but with a new hope: The world organization may be disunited, but the American superpower can give the requisite and necessary leadership.
It is willing to pay the high price of leadership. But this is not an imperialist war for national aggrandizement. It is a war to make democracy safe and available for all people of the world. So it will not be a long war, not an extended array of surgical operations, but a short one that will surely lead to healing and the health of all nations.
Yu-Tang D. Lew
Taipei
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