In recent days, I’ve been expressing dismay at Hillary Clinton: in this column, for instance, and in this Corner post. Can you stand some more quotation of her? In an interview, she said, “There are some days when we’re dealing with very difficult security issues when you kind of wish, ‘Oh man, I wish I didn’t know that.’”
Yeah, it’s terrible when the world does that to you. Say you want to come to terms with the Iranian regime — want to reason with them. But you find out that, really and truly, they’re bent on acquiring nuclear weapons — which they indicate they’re itching to use. It’s a pain when you have to know something like that — something that will intrude on your fantasy.
I treasure one particular story, which comes from a reporter in Israel/the PA. When the peace-processors summoned Arafat and his gang back from Tunis, the reporter went out into the territories. He came upon a policeman and said, “So, now there’s to be peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, huh?” And the policeman scoffed, “Oh, no: This is just the old incrementalism. We’re just lulling them. One day, all of Palestine will be ours.”
The reporter naturally put this in his story — and his Israeli editor spiked that part. When the reporter asked why, the editor said annoyedly, “Can’t you give peace a chance?”
Some people just don’t want to know . . .
Here is something related — something outrageous, really: The Associated Press tells us, “For close to a year . . . a report on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons experiments has been sitting in a drawer of a U.N. nuclear monitoring agency, with access limited to only a few top officials. The question is whether the document — a summary of all the International Atomic Energy Agency knows about Iran’s nuclear program — will be made public when [the] agency publishes its latest report on Iran within two weeks.”
The IAEA’s chief, as you know, is Mohamed ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005. I wrote an article about him when he won that prize — and here is an excerpt:
Back in January, I watched ElBaradei at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. He was on a panel with the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi. They gave the appearance of being chums and allies, and spoke as though Washington’s concern about Iranian nukes were terribly silly. After all, Bush and his team had been wrong about Saddam, yes? And yet Iran succeeded in fooling the IAEA about its program for 18 years. It took an Iranian dissident group to blow the whistle on the nuclearizing mullahs.
Back to that recent Associated Press report (which can be found here, incidentally): “But although even some of his senior aides favor publication, ElBaradei has balked, they said. The agency chief has been keen to avoid moves that could harden already massive Iranian intransigence on cooperating with his agency on probing the allegations and on other issues — and of pushing the U.S. or Israel closer to a possible military strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.”
That sentence is garbled, but we get the point: Don’t give the world the information it needs, because doing so may lead to a result you don’t like. This is what the International Atomic Energy Agency is for?
If you would like to read that article of mine on ElBaradei and the peace prize: Here ’tis. We titled it, “How Low Can They Go?” (they being the Nobel committee).
That Hitler and other top Nazis were vegetarians and animal-rights enthusiasts should not embarrass vegetarians or animal-rights enthusiasts. For all I know, Pol Pot liked ice cream — which should not embarrass us ice-cream lovers at all.
Come to think of it, Hitler loved — adored — The Merry Widow. It was apparently his favorite work of art. And, naturally, he loved Wagner. Lehár’s operetta and Wagner’s operas are great, in their own ways — and Hitler’s admiration should not embarrass us in the least. (Well, Wagner is a special case, but we can take that up some other time, as we have taken it up before.)
I am leading into something, as you may guess. Just chew over this report from Reuters:
President Barack Obama is trying to make positive changes in the United States, but is being fought at every turn by right-wingers who hate him because he is black, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Tuesday.
In an unusually conciliatory column in the state-run media [as opposed to the other media!], Castro said Obama had inherited many problems from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and was trying to resolve them. But the “powerful extreme right won’t be happy with anything that diminishes their prerogatives in the slightest way.”
Obama does not want to change the U.S. political and economic system, but “in spite of that, the extreme right hates him for being African-American and fights what the president does to improve the deteriorated image of that country,” Castro wrote.
“I don’t have the slightest doubt that the racist right will do everything possible to wear him down, blocking his program to get him out of the game one way or another, at the least political cost,” he said.
(For the complete article, go here.) Castro, the totalitarian dictator, sounds like a good number of our liberal commentators. Does this embarrass them, at all? When bin Laden came out with that statement that sounded like cribbing from Michael Moore — was Moore embarrassed, or anyone else? I mean, Castro’s language: It’s just astounding. He could be in almost any American faculty lounge.
You always sound McCarthyite when you say these things. But then, they’re just — like, true.
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