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Opinion,
Page 8 Tuesday, June 16, 1981 The Michigan Daily
The Michigan Daily
Vol. XCl, No. 29-S
Ninety Years of Editorial/Freedom
Edited and managed by students
at the University of Michigan
Dragon deflator
P ERHAPS THE BIG, bad federal
government isn't a monstrosity in
everyone's eyes after all.
Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling upholding
the national stripmining law is a clear-cut vic-
tory not only for ecology but for federal!
regulatory power. The law-which requires
mining companies to leave land in the same
condition it was before they mined it-had been
challenged in the courts by the claim that such
alaw was a usurpation of states' rights.
The Court's surprising decision contains
multifold benefits: It should prove a boon to en-
vironmentalists, who have lately been fighting
a losing battle against the Reagan Ad-
ministration's concerted campaign to roll back
ecology statutes for the benefit of big business
interests.
More importantly, the ruling provides a
desperately needed shot in the arm for
Washington's embattled regulatory agencies,
relentlessly castigated by Reagan & Co. as the
living symbol of bureaucratic obtrusiveness.
Perhaps the Court's decree will enlighten some
Americans to the fact that regulation is not the
root of all Big Brother evil; in many cases it
remains the only effective means of protecting
the individual against the abuses of both cor-
porate and governmental power.
It's going to take a gargantuan effort to suc-
cessfully puncture all the phony dragons Mr.
Reagan has inflated for public consumption.
The Supreme Court's unexpectedly gutsy ruling
is one step in the right direction.
ULIET DIPLOMACY
MX/fP p ( ';
,S tA ARfTh ~ A
AaD Gov -
Bullies of the desert
By FRED SCHILL
Paranoia invites paranoia.
Reactie'i invites cause. There
could surely be no better way for
Israel to legitimize its own
paranoid nightmares to provoke
hostility from its neighbors.
Fifth
Column a
By Fred Schill
The June 7 pre-emptive strike
on an Iraqi nuclear reactor by
Israeli forces is thus one of the
Given such a conlusion, it is even
possible to see the perverse
rationale; of Israel's do-unto-
others-before-they-do-unto-you rea-
soning.
But if Israel intends to pursue
such a policy, they have a lot of
others to do unto in the next few
years - and it isn't going to be easy
now that the others have caught on-
to the game. Since the United
States opened this Pandora's box
almost 36 years ago, only six other
nations (if one includes Israel, a
safe assumption) have developed
their own nuclear toys.
That; however, is changing. Most
experts expect all of the following to
achieve nuclear capability in the
more comfortable and (I hope)
likely than the idea that Israel
really intends to police their corner
of the world. Attempts by the United
States to do the same thing on a
larger scale have embroiled the
world's most powerful nations in a
costly and pointless nuclear arms
race. How could it be any different
in the Middle East?
Israel declares that if the Iraqis
rebuild their reactor, they will blow
it up again. Such a proclamation
triggers hostility of the sort Israel is
always complaining about; it pours
salt into already-deep wounds.
Peres' ideas about achieving peace
in the Middle East may be
unrealistic, but they damn sure beat
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J
THE L. A. TIMES SYNDICATE
more twisted and neurotic ac-
tions in the recent history of a
twisted, neurotic conflict. This is
the action of a belligerent child,
hitting his brother and then
screaming indignantly to his
mother, "He wants to hit me!"
How can one have sympathy with
Israel's oft-stated claim that
Arab nations want to destroy it
when Israel itself takes such a
destructive action?
Moreover, the Israelis have
added a new twist to the big-
brother bullying. Now the cry
goes more like, "Not only does he
want to hit me, but he's wanted to
all along." So Israel struck first.
IT WOULD, of course, be naive
to believe Iraq intended to use its
reactor strictly for benevolent
purposes (all French pretensions
notwithstanding). Oil-rich Iraq,
after all, needs a nuclear reactor
like Newcastle needs coals. The
French knew that, and it didn't
take Israel long to catch on.
In that sense, Israel is caught
betweeen Iraq and a hard place.
next 10-15 years: South Africa,
Pakistan, Taiwan, Iraq, Libya,
Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Note that,
the last five are in the Mideast.
Oddly, Shimon Peres (Menachem
Begin's rival in the upcoming
Israeli elections) has loudly stated
his supposed intentions to make
peaceful overtures to Saudi Arabia
and Jordon's King Saddam
Hussein, and was leading Begin in
public opinion polls. Now there's a
good one for you - a man who
spouts peace rhetoric leads in the
electoral polls until his opponent
belligerently attacks another
nation. Then the populace swings
toward the aggressor.
GO FIGURE IT. Apparently
peace is only popular in the absence
of war, or at least that's what the
reaction of the people of Israel
would indicate.'Begin knew it all
along, and quite probably attacked
Iraq first and foremost because he
knew it would garnerPiim votes,(as
long as the raid succeeded, as
Israeli raids nearly always do).
Sinister as that suggestion it; it is
Begin's visionarypolicestate.
THERE IS no way Israel can
peacefully prevent its traditional
enemies from developing nuclear
weapons. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and
Libya surely would not tolerate such
attacks as passively as Iraq did
(Iraq, after all, already has a war
with Iran on its hands).
Attacks like the June 7 episode
are at best fruitless and at worst
apocalyptic. At most they can only
encourage Arab nations to build
nuclear weapons more quickly and
ardently (paranoia invokes
paranoia), since they obviously
have an aggressive neighbor. At
worst, they will cluse those nations
to use such weapons - against
Israel and others.
Surely there must be safer, saner
methods of relieving Middle East
hostility. If Menachem Begin
believes differently, then one can
only hope Israel chooses Peres'
way.
Fred Schill is a staff writer
for, tfie Daily. His column ap-
-pears each Tuesday.
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