The Morning News from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 14

A14 The Morning News, Wilmington, Delaware Thursday, Oct. 15, 1981 The Morning News A Gannett Newspaper Susanne P. Corty, Joseph J. Hanson and John H. Taylor Editorial Writers Mary M.

Baker, Editorial Assistant John Curley, President and Publisher J. Donald Brandt, Editor of the Editorial Page on In Poland William Raspberry Pot boils What we lost in Sadat's death The world continues to hold its breath about Poland. The Soviet bloc fears contamination from the rebellious Poles. The leaders in the Kremlin worry about international repercussions should they invade Poland. The western powers walk a tightrope of wishing to encourage the stirrings for freedom in Poland and to discourage the Russians from taking military action.

It's hard to believe, but this Polish drama has been playing for more than a year now. It began in the summer of last year in Gdansk with worker strikes and has expanded since into the multi-million-person Solidarity movement, which in addition to workers includes farmers, students, intellectuals. This widespread popular support for Solidarity which espouses better working conditions, press freedom, a bigger role for the Catholic Church, more concern for the common man and less concern for the governmental bureaucrat has made the movement assume a life all its own. The leaders of Solidarity, even though they have been affirmed in their leadership positions by elections held in their just-completed congress, seem unable to hold their flock in check. Work stoppages and strike threats are daily events even though Solidarity's leaders do not want them while they negotiate with the government in Warsaw about food prices, fuel shortages and other problems.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that the dissatisfaction with the Communist Party regime runs so deep that many Poles are willing to abandon caution and continue to rebel and strike, against the advice of their leaders and in spite of the well-known threat of Russian takeover. It is a sobering reminder that it is easier to start wars and revolutions than to end them. At the same time as events in Poland are showing how difficult it is to control a boiling pot from within, it is also becoming evident how difficult it is to exert influence from without. To be sure, the Kremlin's threats are having an impact, but they have not yet drawn the curtain on the drama. And the role of Western powers has been muted by the realization that too much encouragement for Solidarity could bring the Russians over the brink.

Indeed, the only assistance that those sympathetic to the Poles' cause have been able to offer has been through nonofficial channels, such as support from labor organizations, granting extensions on loans, and donations of food and clothing from private groups. Delawareans, many of whom have Polish roots, have been and continue to be generous in supporting these private efforts. And some fortunate citizens of Poland will be less cold and hungry this winter because of that generosity. But the sad fact is that however helpful and generous this private assistance is, the basic problems in Poland will remain as long as there is an oppressive regime and a people no longer willing to dig coal, plant seeds or produce goods. The rebellious Poles, who won't heed the call of patience from Solidarity's leaders, seem to be sending the message that they'd rather be cold and hungry than continue to be denied meaningful economic and political freedoms.

If that is the message, the leaders in Moscow and in Warsaw have the choice of brutally suppressing the uprisings or of yielding to accommodation. Since few in the West suggest direct intervention in Poland, we all await the answer with anxiety and apprehension. a bold, mxumt LfcMfcR. STKRSMAN WW fc VISION OF pawx-A so obviously out of step im com usu" the refusal of the Arabs, specifically the Palestine Liberation Organization, to accept the legitimacy of Israel's existence. Sadat's move could have swept away this deadly psychology, if only there had been a complementary grand gesture from Begin.

It never came. Instead of accepting Sadat's statesmanship as an effort to cut the Gordian knot of bitter history, the Israeli leader treated it as the WASHINGTON The saddest thing about the death of Egypt's Anwar Sadat is that it was such a waste. It is impossible to know what mix of motives, religious, political or personal, inspired his assassins. But it may not be overstating the case to say that what cost Sadat his life and the thing that will make the world miss him most was his historic gamble for peace. Sadat understood as well as anyone that the barrier to peace in the Middle East was always psychological: a melange of bitterness that the world seemed to care too little when the Nazi Holocaust claimed the lives of 6 million Jews and of guilt that too many Jews went too unresistingly to their deaths.

The Israeli psychology is capsulized in the phrase: "Never again." Sadat understood as well that the Palestinians, who had no part in the Holocaust and who cared nothing about the the psychological scars it left on the Jews, were equally bitter and guilt-ridden that they had been displaced, also too unresistingly, by the establishment of the Jewish state. Their answer to the Jews' "Never again" was their determination to liberate their homeland from the Jewish intruders. This psychological standoff, Sadat knew, was incapable of military resolution. What was needed was a psychological breakthrough. Sadat provided the opportunity for just such a breakthrough with his unprecedented 1977 visit to Israel.

It was a masterful gesture which said, in effect: Let us put our psychology behind us and agree to make peace. It seemed for a while that the gamble might work. But the Camp David peace talks engineered by then President Carter fell short of Sadat's dream. It was the Egyptian's notion that if he and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin could agree to make peace, it could mark the beginning of a generalized peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. What was required was not a lawyerly working out of details technicians could handle that but an agreement in principle between the two chiefs of state.

Ironically, until shortly before Sadat's statesmanlike gesture, it was the Israelis who were insisting that the barriers to peace were psy-. chological: that the problem was President Sadat knew there couldn't be a military resolution of the standoff; a psychological breakthrough was needed tunity, could have saved him or at least could have saved and institutionalized the peace process. As it was, the peace effort, from the Arab side, was embodied in the person of Sadat. And with his death, both sides are far worse off than before. 1 It is easy enough to understand why Israel was unwilling to enter into a gamble of the magnitude of Sadat's.

The far-more-numerous Arabs could lose militarily again and again and still survive. For Israel, a series of military victories could only buy time; a single defeat would be fatal. The other side of that somber fact, though, is that Israel could never save itself through military might but only through peace with its neighbors. Sadat tried, and' failed, to make that peace. Sadat laid everything on the line: his personal and political prestige, his credibility and his life.

If Israel had joined in the gamble if even a few of the Arab chiefs of state could have seen that it was in their overwhelming self-interest to become party to the search for peace Sadat's gamble could have changed the course of Middle East history for all time. They didn't. Sadat has died a wasted death, and business in that strife-torn part of the world will go tragically on as usual. William Raspberry is a Washington Post columnist. What we get in envoy trade The diplomats assigned to foreign capitals often tell a great deal about the philosophies and the policies of the nations they represent.

Below are two examples of recent new assignments in diplomacy. opening gambit in a round of ordinary negotiations: negotiations which, for all the hoopla that surrounded each petty point of agreement, in fact got nowhere. As a result, Sadat, instead of becoming a leader of his Arab brothers became isolated from them as a man who had dared make peace with the mortal enemy. He was viewed by them as a traitor and a fool, and he was, almost from that moment, a dead man. Israel, if it had seized the oppor 3 choices were fine but not 4th Richard L.Walker The new U.S.

ambassador to South Korea is a 59-year-old specialist in history, politics and international relations. He earned his bachelor of arts degree from Drew University, and his master of arts and doctoral degrees from Yale University. From 1950 to 1957, he was an assistant professor of history at Yale. Since 1957 he has been a professor of international studies at the University of South Carolina. where he was named the James F.

Byrnes professor of international relations in 1959. He has taught international relations and public affairs at the University of Washington and at Taiwan University. He has been a visiting professor of political affairs at the National War College and lectured in his specialties at the Departmemt of Defense, the Foreign Service Institute, the Army War College, the Armed Forces Staff College, the Air War College, the Naval War College, Australian National University and Hong Kong University. He is a member of a host of international organizations, has won honors too numerous to mention and has written much about Asia and the Pacific region, particularly China and Japan. Lew Byong Hion The new South Korean ambassador to the United States is a 57-year-old graduate of the Korean Military Academy, the U.S.

Armor School and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He attended Korea's National War College and completed post-graduate work in economics at Yonsei University. He was promoted to brigadier general in 1961 while commander of Korea's Seventh Infantry Regiment. Soon after the military revolution of 1961, he was named a member of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction of the Military Government.

He was briefly minister of agriculture and forestry before returning to military service. In 1966 he was promoted to major general and assigned command of the Capital (Tiger) Division in Vietnam. He was promoted to lieutenant general in 1972 and given command of the 5th Corps. He was made a full general in 1978 and deputy commander in chief, Republic of KoreaU.S. Combined Forces Command.

Since December 1979, he has been chairman of South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff. He wears medals and military honors awarded by South Korea, the United States, Thailand, the Republic of China and Vietnam. Bill Frank Of course, I would be out of character if I didn't have a serious question about at least one of the first four women selected for the Hall of Fame of Delaware Women. I was among those who jammed Buena Vista's ballroom the other day when the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women honored three very much alive women and a fourth Delaware woman posthumously. No quarrel at all with the selection of Pearl Herlihy Daniels, Dr.

Ruth M. Laws and Mary Ann Wright as the Hall of Fame's first living women. I joined Gov. Pete du Pont and the hundreds of others in acclaiming these three women as most excellent choices. But why Dr.

Annie Jump Cannon, world famous astronomer born in the village of Leipsic, who died in 1941? Before the women of the Governors Commission start screaming at me, let me make it clear that I It is too early to be certain of the course U.S.-South Korean relations will take. It does seem reasonable, however, to guess that the United States will continue to be pressed both in Seoul and in Washington to continue the costly commitments of troops and arms that it has made to South Korea for three decades. The United States is less likely to generate any enthusiasm among South Korean officialdom for expressions of U.S. concern about the lack or abuse of civil rights in South Korea, which was what all those troops and arms were supposed to secure for its people in the first place. Letters against a comparatively small coterie of male astronomers.

On the other hand, Dr. Handy fought against society's indifference to child care; Mrs. Hilles and Miss Vernon faced the vicious antagonism of male-dominated political forces and Miss Kruse confronted the white community's prejudices and anger and the frustrations of old-time blacks willing to surrender to conditions dating from the damnable practice of human slavery. No, no, a thousand times no! Let us never diminish recognition of the achievements of Dr. Cannon, who by the way was acclaimed not long ago by the National League of Women Voters as one of America's 12 greatest women of the 20th century.

The story goes that her mother, a Quaker, encouraged her to climb onto the roof of the Cannon home on State Street, Dover, to scan the skies and study the stars. As a child, she made observations with the aid of a tallow candle much to the fright of her father who was afraid little Annie would set the house afire. Later, she studied at what is now Wesley College, Dover, and continued through Wellesley and Harvard. In 1911, she was named curator of astronomical photographs in the Harvard Observatory. She also received an honorary degree from Oxford in 1925 and was admitted to membership of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Now that I am in a less cantankerous mood, let me rave about the slide presentation on the history of women's achievements in Delaware, collected by Yetta Chaiken and narrated by Dr. Carol Hof-fecker, already one of Delaware's leading historians. This superb collection of pictures and stories was financed by the Delaware Humanities Forum with contributions from the Delaware and Wilmington branches of the American Association of University Women and from the Junior League of Wilmington. Every woman in Delaware and every man should see this credit to the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women. Bill Frank is a News Journal mm VP Hfe i WsvfflLSft W2 WWNINSHfc have always admired Dr.

Cannon. I have written columns of praise about her and her remarkable achievements in astronomy. Long before any of the members of the commission ever heard about Dr. Cannon, I was involved in laudatory biographical notes on this remarkable woman. But was she so remarkable as to be among the first in the Hall of Fame of Delaware Women to the exclusion of several others? If I had been pushed against the wall to select one or two deceased noted women of Delaware for the Hall of Fame, I promptly would have named the late Dr.

Margaret Handy, the late Mabel Vernon or the late Florence Bayard Hilles. While Dr. Cannon had her eyes on the stars and the planets swirling around our earth, Dr. Handy, as a pioneer woman physician, was down on the earth, caring for hundreds of babies, anguished mothers and frantic fathers. Mrs.

Hilles and Miss Vernon also had their feet firmly planted on earth, fighting, clawing and screaming in most unladylike fashion for the right of women to vote. Miss Vernon had the courage and conviction in her time to openly attack President Wilson and demand why he wasn't doing more to enhance the woman's suffrage cause. She and Mrs. Hilles even went to jail for their cause. In my most perverse manner, I even might have selected the late Mrs.

Henry B. Thompson, who though a dedicated foe of women's suffrage was nonetheless one of our century's truly great women. I would have also considered the late Edwina B. Kruse for the honor. She was the undaunted champion for improved educational facilities and opportunities for thousands of Delaware black children.

Against Dr. Handy, Mrs. Hilles, Miss Kruse and Miss Vernon, Dr. Cannon was minor league. After all, these women I've mentioned fought for their causes in the face of the most horrifying odds, arrogant male greed and indifference and the most bigoted society.

In her struggle for recognition Dr. Cannon might have been up A failure fn planning Your Oct. 9 article says that a family that lives in Mount Pleasant, just north of Middletown, claims to be suffering from the dust from Townsend's a feed and grain processing plant. It is regrettable that the land-use planning process freely allows housing, here, in the face of obvious constraints, to challenge a viable The Morning News welcomes letters. Please address them to Letters to the Editor, The Morning News, Wilmington, Del.

19899. economic entity (in this case a company that was established in 1912). Though the latter entity appears to be meeting environmental standards, obviously its new neighbor must suffer because of a lack of caution exercised in the land-use regulatory process. That process continually fails to prevent such conflicts in our communities' urbanization. I 1 CHARLES M.

WEYMOUTH Architect 'I 1 1 it. Dit. FWd N(wppr Symtlcitt, 1M1 If.