October 14, 1999
China And The Continent
Terrorism And Trials
Private Rocketry Blasts Off
Davis Gets Technical
China And The Continent
Chinese and European Union trade officials sat down to discuss China's long-delayed entry into the World Trade Organization Sunday, AP reports. EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, who has recently taken the post, says he hopes that full-scale EU-Chinese trade negotiations can now resume. The EU has supported China's WTO entry, but since talks were suspended after the May bombing of China's embassy in Yugoslavia by NATO, several EU negotiators said that China's goal of entering the WTO before the meeting of representatives of WTO member states in Seattle in November is highly unlikely.
"Most agree that WTO membership for China is beneficial not just for China but for the world trading community at-large. Those who oppose China's membership in the WTO are mostly heads of state-run monopolies in China or heads of powerful labor unions in the United States. For China, WTO membership will help bolster the position of Premier Zhu Rongji, who faces the difficult task of keeping China on the reform path. For other countries, it will help integrate China more peacefully into the international community as well as open up China's market to increased foreign competition," wrote Mark Groombridge in the commentary "The Right Way to Get China into the WTO". On November 17 in Washington, D.C., just over a week before the Seattle meeting begins, the Cato Institute will host the conference Seattle and Beyond: The Future of the WTO.
Daniel T. Griswold wrote in the article "Admit China to the WTO, But Don't Bend The Rules" that "[b]efore China gains the prestige and market access membership confers, its rulers need to show more commitment to the principles of liberal trade and the rule of law. The issue should not be whether to admit China to the 132-member club, but when and under what conditions. After two decades of domestic reform and falling trade barriers, China has become the world's 11th largest trade economy. Barring a retreat on liberalization, its 1.2 billion people guarantee that its weight in the world economy will only grow larger in the next decade." In the article "Risky... or Worthy WTO Bid?", James A. Dorn writes that "[i]f the liberal trading order is to expand and prosper in the 21st century, China must be part of that order. And it must be admitted on the basis of the same principles that apply to other WTO members. An important first step would be to end discrimination against China and treat it as a market economy."
Terrorism And Trials
Hani al-Sayegh, a Saudi dissident suspected of taking part in the Khobar Towers apartment bombing that killed 19 U.S. military personnel, is back in Saudi Arabia after being deported from the United States, AP reports. "The suspect is now in the hands of Saudi justice and he will be interrogated just like any other suspect. He will be tried according to Islamic law," said Prince Nayef. The Saudi government alleges that al-Sayegh drove a car that signaled the driver of the explosive-filled truck that led to the deaths. Meanwhile in Algeria, insurgents massacred eight members of a family while they slept, in the deadliest attack since Algerians endorsed a peace plan last month. At least 17 people were killed in attacks last week throughout the nation.
"According to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, terrorism is the most important threat the United States and the world face as the 21st century begins. High-level U.S. officials have acknowledged that terrorists are now more likely to be able to obtain and use nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons than ever before," Ivan Eland wrote in the December 1998 Cato Foreign Policy Briefing "Does U.S. Intervention Overseas Breed Terrorism?" "Yet most attention has been focused on combating terrorism by deterring and disrupting it beforehand and retaliating against it after the fact. Less attention has been paid to what motivates terrorists to launch attacks. According to the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, a strong correlation exists between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States. President Clinton has also acknowledged that link. The board, however, has provided no empirical data to support its conclusion. This paper fills that gap by citing many examples of terrorist attacks on the United States in retaliation for U.S. intervention overseas. The numerous incidents cataloged suggest that the United States could reduce the chances of such devastating--and potentially catastrophic--terrorist attacks by adopting a policy of military restraint overseas."
Issues arising from Islamic fundamentalism are discussed in the Cato Policy Analysis "The 'Green Peril': Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat": "There is no easy answer to the question of whether Islam and democracy are compatible… Some leaders of Islamic movements have adopted a negative attitude toward democracy as an expression of their rejection of European colonial influence and, more recently, of U.S. intervention in the Middle East… In most Middle Eastern countries, including Algeria and Iran, Islamic fundamentalism is already sweeping away the corrupt old political order of the Arab world… One question that troubles many analysts is whether the Islamic movement will tolerate diversity when in power or try to impose an intolerant monolithic order on society. The record of the Islamic experiments in Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan is mixed. Those governments have used power to discriminate against minorities and women and to repress dissidents. But their record has not been worse--and in some cases it has been better--than that of secular regimes or more traditional monarchies… The danger for the Western nations, in particular the United States, is that misperceptions will cloud their judgment of and produce counterproductive policies toward Islam and the Middle East. Instead of viewing Islam as a monolithic force, Western analysts and policymakers should recognize that it is a diverse civilization, divided along cultural, ideological, religious, ethnic, and national lines. Even the term 'Islamic fundamentalism' should perhaps be modified to reflect the different movements and groups that are lumped into that category."
Private Rocketry Blasts Off
A U.S. satellite was launched Saturday atop a joint Ukrainian-Russian rocket in the first commercial liftoff by the Sea Launch Company, an international consortium led by U.S. aerospace manufacturer Boeing, AP reports. The Zenit-3SL rocket lifted off an oceanic platform at a point near the equator.
"Why Hasn't Space Flight Developed As Rapidly As Aviation?" asks Edward L. Hudgins in a commentary. "The explanation lies in the different development paths of civil aviation and civilian space. The Wright brothers were the first to fly, in 1903, acting as private individuals, pursuing their own vision and using their own money. Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927, trying to win the privately offered $ 25,000 Orteig Prize. By the late 1930s the first commercially viable aircraft, the Douglas DC-3, was flying. Much of early civil aviation was funded privately. The government, of course, was interested in aircraft for defense. But often it simply offered a prize to whatever private provider could make a wing or fuselage to best meet its needs…
"The landings on the Moon were great human and technological achievements. But the government's Manhattan Project approach to lunar missions (throw lots of money at the task) was not sustainable. In the early 1970s NASA, like any government bureaucracy, sought to maintain its staffs and budgets. Its partially reusable shuttle was meant to reduce the costs of putting payloads into orbit. Over the decades, the costs in fact went up. Furthermore, NASA systematically stifled competing private space enterprises, turning down many offers of those providers to launch rockets and stations. A raft of regulations and government-to-government treaties hampered private space efforts as well. But a series of small, hard-won reforms after the 1986 Challenger disaster has allowed the private sector to struggle for its place in space. For example, Lockheed Martin's Atlas launch vehicles already carry more private commercial satellites than government cargoes. But what is really needed in the 21st century is a strategy to back the government out of civilian space activities and allow imaginative private sector ideas to flourish."
Davis Gets Technical
Gov. Gray Davis (D-Calif.) has vetoed a bill that would have required companies to inform their workers before monitoring their e-mail, AP reports. Davis said that the measure violated employer rights. Davis compared e-mail monitoring to other employer rights, such as the right to limit personal long-distance phone calls, and warned that the law might have provoked lawsuits, since businesses can be sued if employees use work computers for online harassment. In another Internet privacy story, engineers working on a new way to transmit information across the Internet want to include a unique serial number from each personal computer within every parcel of data, AP reports. Privacy advocates fear that the inclusion could lead to identity tracing and may violate online anonymity.
"Privacy advocates are urging the FTC to create a world where every new network technology conforms to the bizarre idea that trade in information that simply reports facts about real people and real transactions is wrong. If this rule had been in place 100 years ago, regulators might have effectively made credit reporting too expensive to operate as a business, and we'd still be stuck in a world where poor people couldn't buy goods on credit. Telephone books, Internet Protocols, e-mail addresses and Ethernet cards might have been regulated out of existence," Solveig Singleton wrote in the August commentary "Innovation Versus Privacy". "This is not an exaggeration. European privacy bureaucrats recently reported that 'Presently it is almost impossible to use the Internet without being confronted with privacy-invading features which carry out all kinds of processing operations of personal data in a way that is invisible to the data subjects.' And Dutch regulator Diana Alonso warned that 'We just want to let (companies) know when they are making new software and hardware, they should pay attention to [privacy] principles.' This nonsense should raise red flags for business and consumers alike. The Internet works as an affordable communications medium because it is designed to facilitate cost-effective, fast, and seamless communications. Period. It is not and should not be designed to ameliorate groundless technophobia."
Singleton concluded in testimony before Congress that "[g]iven the flurry of concern about privacy, even legislators and businesses worried about the impact on electronic commerce are almost ready to concede the need for 'minimal regulation'... But from my standpoint that's too radical a step, both unnecessary and not well informed. What kind of enforcement mechanism would we create? Do we really want to penalize the honest owner of a 50 year-old hardware store in Peoria because he put up his web site without a privacy notice? … Things are working fine as they are; leave the Internet alone."