THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer’s name, city, and state.
*1*
I am writing about a seriously inaccurate statement in Victorino Matus’s Dropping the E-bomb, specifically where he cites an unnamed “scientist” claiming that “what would happen if someone were hit by a megawatt HPM weapon: ‘All the fluid in their body cells would instantly vaporise into steam. It would happen so fast, you wouldn’t even be aware of it'” and also “if, on the other hand, you were caught in the sidelobe of the beam, or even by a weak reflection of the main beam off a metal surface–which could easily happen in a city–you would probably suffer terrible burns as well as permanent brain damage.”
Sorry, but that is simply not what any realistic HPM system would do. As such, Matus’s article spreads needless fear regarding this technology. HPM devices do indeed radiate extremely high powers, but only for very short pulses. The energy delivered to a target is simply insufficient to cause the kinds of outrageous bodily damage asserted in Matus’s article. Indeed, the energy necessary to actually hurt people is far, far higher than that needed to hurt many kinds of electronic parts, as noted in various open-literature technical reviews, including for example, Chapter 6 of “High-Power Microwave Systems and Effects,” by C.D. Taylor and D.V. Giri, published by Taylor and Francis, copyright 1994.
–Dr. Robert A. Koslover, Senior Scientist, SARA, Inc.
Victorino Matus responds: The scientist Dr. Koslover questions was quoted in a piece written for Jane’s Defence Weekly by Washington Bureau Chief Andrew Koch and Nick Cook, an aerospace consultant also with Jane’s. Cook tells me this scientist still stands by his assertion regarding “the potential outcome of an individual being struck with a 1MW HPM weapon.”
*2*
Terry Eastland and others mutter and moan that supposed droves of unmarried women have the gall to choose abortion over adoption; thus denying worthy married couples the chance to acquire a child of their very own (“The Forgotten Option”). How thoughtless of those wanton hussies!
Get over it! Women aren’t the property of the state (yet) and their children cannot be harvested (yet) for the cozy kitchens of the “more deserving.” When I shared Eastland’s essay with a group of birth mothers who had relinquished children for adoption, they reacted with amusement and irony. Many expressed the oft repeated view that if they had known the ill effects of relinquishment on themselves–and that their children’s identities and heritages would be confiscated and sealed by the state–that they’d have run to the neighborhood abortionist post haste and gotten it over with rather than dragging it out over the next four decades. More than a few suggested politely that Eastland get out of their wombs.
There is no connection between abortion and adoption except the one that the anti-abortion crowd has created to push its own agenda. Today women have abortions because they don’t want to be pregnant. Today women surrender a child for adoption because they either can’t or don’t want to parent. If you really want to make adoption a more attractive option, stop treating adoption and adoptees as a dirty little state secret, and give us our records. And while you’re at it, stop acting as if women are breeder cows. Moo!!
–Marley Elizabeth Greiner, Executive Chair, Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization
*3*
David Brooks left out an important, and highly possible, if incredibly repugnant, possibility: Perhaps the French, as our fight with Iraq approaches, are weighing which side they like better, and the answer is, not us (French Kiss-Off). Even knowing that Iraq would come in second in a fight with the United States, they still just can’t manage to stand up and be seen saying they’re with les Americains.
As long as we’re trying to consider all possibilities, this theory comports with all the facts on the ground. I for one would not doubt it.
–Charles Cianfrocca
*4*
In the United States, we end up agreeing to disagree by holding one of these three positions: (1) We absorb the first strike and do nothing about it (the far left, “we deserve it” position); (2) We absorb the first strike, then go to war (the irresponsible, lack of leadership position); or (3) We act now to end Saddam’s ability to cause harm (the responsible, leadership position, held by the Bush administration).
Outside the United States, it is easier to accept that the West must absorb the first strike because it is assumed that the inglorious victim will be America. This is a pity because both Israel and Europe are more accessible and cannot be excluded as first strike targets. Nonetheless, France and Germany are reasonable in their belief that their prior dealings with Saddam provide them a shield against a first strike (the September 11 attacks were organized in Hamburg but executed in New York).
History, as usual, is a useful guide for understanding the present. First, alliances are intended to encumber the dominating power, and second, their tradition is to punish the initiator of war. The sad, unsaid, but easily predictable truth is that most of the world would rather have Saddam strike America first.
–Charles Gordon Holladay
*5*
The work Christian Lowe describes is exactly what I did as a member of the 41st Civil Affairs Company in Vietnam (Nation-Building. Nice to see CA finally getting some press.
–Glenn Siegal
*6*
Katherine Mangu-Ward’s Guns for Tots is doubtless meant to be deliciously ironic. Unfortunately she shows herself to be just another liberal-minded press pundit who favors the school-mistress approach to regulating the lives of the public. Alas, it’s so familiar. “Very well then, someone broke a window. So all baseballs are confiscated.” There are a few irresponsible imbeciles out there, so none of us can be trusted.
It’s inevitable I suppose that some silly ass is going to paint a water-pistol black and point it at an armed police officer. And if he gets shot, it serves him/her damn well right. Why should everyone else be blamed?
But liberals always have a law ready, don’t they. Ban this, ban that. Never mind punishing the guilty. Focus on inanimate objects instead. How many murders are committed with kitchen knives? I don’t have any statistics, but obviously some are. So why not ban kitchen knives? Or at least register them.
We don’t need knife control any more than we need water-pistol control–or gun control. We need criminal control.
–Nigel Eddis
*7*
Jacques Chirac’s bio can be found here. David Brooks will note that he was wounded while serving in Algeria in 1959. I thought this was worth calling to Brooks’s attention since he raised questions about the courage and character of the French.
–Jonas Bernstein
*8*
If David Brooks really wants to get upset about French attitudes, he should read the “chat boxes” in the online version of Le Monde and other French newspapers. They represent Bush as somehow both stupid and diabolical, and the United States as the greatest threat the world has ever known.
It is, of course, possible, as Brooks suggests, to characterize this phobia for all things American as based upon fear or cowardice. However, I would modify these notions slightly. Much of the vehement anti-Americanism in the chat boxes derives from French Muslims (judging by nicknames such as “Khalid”). The native French fear a restive Islamic population, especially in Provence/Languedoc; and French politicians fear overt hostile measures on their part, which will, as they did in the last election, provoke a nativist backlash and therefore further political incursions on the part of Le Pen. Thus there is a sort of cowardice at work, but the fear is not directed at Saddam; rather it takes the form of propitiation of the French Muslim and, by extension, of the nativist populations.
–A.M. Cinquemani
*9*
I was also watching the C-SPAN coverage of the French news. It was only by supreme self discipline that my television tube is still intact. The sneering posturing of that “intelligence expert” who looked like he was just out of diapers, was particularly infuriating.
It’s time to remove America’s fist completely from the velvet glove vis-a-vis France and Germany. Let’s publish a complete list of all the companies from these nations that have violated the sanctions and let’s publicize (with wire intercepts?) the backroom negotiations going on as France sells its vote for contracts in a post war Iraq. Let’s expose them for the amoral, cynical cowards that they are.
The only power Old Europe projects is from the stench of their rotten principles.
–J. Bourne
*10*
My feelings are similar to the ones Jessica Lange expressed a few weeks back saying that she felt ashamed to be American. Similarly, I feel ashamed to be French today. (As I do regularly when France tries to play smart in a dumb way on the international stage.) Someone please let Mrs. Lange know that there’s a way we could both feel better about all this: Let’s trade places.
–Thierry Stephan
