Newt Gingrich, speaking at CPAC, declared:
Europe is a mess. Greece is the country on the continent closest to utter wreck. (And, if not for statements yesterday by Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, there would literally be no hope for a life raft anywhere near Athens soon. This morning's FT smothers even those wan hopes.) Spain, Portugal and Ireland are not far behind ... or under.
Each of these countries has views on how Israel deals with the Palestinians, and they don't like it at all. Neither do the past and present "foreign ministers"—so to speak, but not exactly—of the European Union. The previous one also a past foreign minister of Spain, Javier Solana, whose main claim to distinction is that he is the grand nephew of Salvador de Madariaga, historian, politician and chief of the ill-fated League of Nations mission for world disarmament. It's a shame, neither Hitler nor Mussolini (nor Tojo) wanted to cooperate. So Solana's blood runs thick with hope and thin with achievement. He did spend his six years as a physics graduate student at the University of Virginia, with a good deal of his energy there siphoned off to march against the Vietnam war. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ha. Ha.
Solana's successor, the Baroness Ashton of Upholland (neé Catherine Ashton), was Labor leader of the House of Lords, testimony to the diminishing stature of the peers. In the eighties, she was treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); this was long after nutty but brilliant Bertie Russell was dead but in the midst of the deepest financial machinations of the Soviet Union in the atomic or anti-American atomic effort. Of course, she didn't know about that—although it is estimated that nearly 40 percent of the campaign's money came from Moscow. And, if she didn't know that, she is capable of knowing nothing.
A few years ago, few places on Earth were as hellish as Iraq’s Anbar Province. Spanning the country’s western desert, Anbar is best known by its major cities, Fallujah and Ramadi, both of which became home bases for Al Qaeda-linked terrorists who flooded across Iraq’s border with Syria and joined with Sunni insurgents to carry out bombings, executions, kidnappings, and torture across the country.
President Obama used the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" six times in his weekly address to the nation. I don't know how long it has actually been since he’s uttered those words. But my memory is that it's been a very long time.
President Obama designated George Mitchell his special envoy to the Jews and the Arabs because he had experience with them. Of course, Mitchell's familiarity with the Middle East was the familiarity of utter failure. No matter. Obama couldn't have sent George Tenet again ... or, God forbid, Anthony Zinni. And he wouldn't dispatch Dennis Ross, who knows far too much that wouldn't have fit with the president's own delusions.
Another reason, perhaps the decisive reason, for dispatching Mitchell was that he had resolved the "Irish question," dating back all the way to the mid-19th century, or "the troubles," which it has been called since the twenties.
An intriguing article in the New York Times by Mark Landler, whom I slighted unfairly last month, is headlined, "Clinton Has Warm Words for Ireland and Britain." I will get to Hillary's warm words for Ireland below. But what struck me was her "assuring the British that they still had a special relationship with the United States." The U.S. has had a "special relationship" with Great Britain since the War of 1812, save for a few hostile but feeble interventions by London on behalf of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
For one, Prime Minister Gordon Brown couldn't get a one-on-one meeting with Obama either during the General Assembly in New York or at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. But that's just a slight. To be sure, Washington was offended by the sneaky arrangements made by the Labour government with Scotland and the tyrannical Gadhafi regime for the release of the Libyan security official who was responsible for the Lockerbie murder of 270 people, 189 of them Americans.
The headlines of the last few months make it clear that there are going to be no free passes for America when it comes to getting its troops out of Iraq. The recent bombing of a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, like the internal warfare in Sunni-dominated Anbar Provice, shows how many Iraqi security problems persist.
But as President Obama continues the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, he should do more than pay attention to conditions on the ground. He should also keep in mind how badly withdrawals from occupied countries have gone in the past, and take to heart the historical lessons these failed withdrawals teach. Though many experts have attempted military, strategic, and political analyses of how and when the United States should withdraw, there has been little attention paid to moral considerations in answering that question.
The health care debate has revolved around the sacrosanct principle that nobody who has health insurance should have to worry about any change in the slightest. President Obama paid lip service to that idea again tonight. But, when he wasn't doing that, he was trying to make people understand that the health care system actually isn't that great. Indeed, it's awful, as almost any empirical examination of costs and outcomes will show.
Let's face it: Moammar Gadhafi has outsmarted the Western powers, and he has been outsmarting them for exactly forty years. Not outsmarting them, by the way, in behalf of an ideology either collectivist or Islamist—although it aspires to leadership in both orbits. Libya's rise this coming year to the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly is a symbolic victory for the mangy man and his very wealthy country with deprived people.
This is a case of kingship with populist and Arabist rhetoric. But what it really is is gangster politics with ideological pretenses that justify keeping independent spirits in prison.
In 2004, while Iraq was both exploding and imploding, George Bush, desperate to show that he had won some Arabs over to "our side," made a deal with Gadhafi: Tripoli would give up its quest for atomic weapons, a quest that its science (unlike Iran's) could not support, and the U.S. and other Western powers would welcome the madman back into civilized society. It worked, more or less, for Gadhafi. It did not work for us.
This was a matter of American interest. More than that: it was actually an American matter. And the contempt that Great Britain, particularly Scotland, and Libya have shown the United States in it is a fact with which we must conjure, lest this drama in four parts otherwise define, delimit and demean our very position in world affairs. This is a choice that neither Russia nor China ever seem to face. That is, they never stand down (or seem even to contemplate standing down) from what they deem to be core. Take, for example, Georgia or Darfur, which on any reasonable reading would be far from core.
This was a matter of American interest. More than that: it was actually an American matter. And the contempt that Great Britain, particularly Scotland, and Libya have shown the United States in it is a fact with which we must conjure, lest this drama in four parts otherwise define, delimit and demean our very position in world affairs. This is a choice that neither Russia nor China ever seem to face. That is, they never stand down (or seem even to contemplate standing down) from what they deem to be core. Take, for example, Georgia or Darfur, which on any reasonable reading would be far from core.
Our centrality in this case, however, should be self-evident. Pan American 103 was an American carrier, "Clipper Maid of the Seas," on its way on December 21, 1988 from Heathrow Airport, London to J.F.K. in New York. Of the 270 dead, fully 189 were Americans, two were infants at two months, and one was an elderly gentleman of 82. There were 66 students on board, plus 17 men in the U.S. defense and security services. Ah, maybe one or a few of these folks were the targets of the bombing, you might be saying to yourself suspiciously. But then this would truly be an act of outright war against the United States.
It took eleven years before a trial was held, much of this time spent in odious negotiations with Moammar Gadhafi over a venue. Even Nelson Mandela was brought into the act, as he often is to rescue from justice some miscreant who happened be an ally of the "revolution." In the end, a new facility was actually built for the Scottish High Court of Justiciary on a former American military base in the Netherlands. I kid you not. There, one of the defendants was found not guilty and Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. Ruth Wedgwood, professor of international law at Johns Hopkins University, has written an eye-opening article for Forbes.com on the legalities and illegalities of the process. Read it, please.
On innumerable trips to Singapore over the past decade, I always made sure to stop by the Old Tanglin Officers' Mess, the city-state's version of the State Department. There, amid a street of gleaming colonial-style buildings and perfectly trimmed tropical foliage, the best diplomats in Asia--fluent English- speakers with a staggering command of regional politics and sharply tailored suits--would entertain me at the after-work bar.
As the age of cheap oil comes to a close, it's springtime for gloomy futurists. Visions of a brutish world marked by violent squabbles over dwindling reserves, of junkyards littered with abandoned cars, of suburban slums overrun by weeds, of the collapse of industrial agriculture--none of this sounds as outlandish as it once did. Still, most of these horror stories are likely overstated: Energy experts tend to agree that, with a little ingenuity and a generous helping of political will, we could transition away from fossil fuels without being forced to give up our modern lifestyles.
I.
Last month, a little-known British historian named Andrew Robert swas swept into the White House for a three-hour-long hug. He lunched with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, huddled alone with the president in the Oval Office, and was rapturously lauded by him as"great." Roberts was so fawned over that his wife, Susan Gilchrist,told the London Observer, "I thought I had a crush on him, but it's nothing like the crush President Bush has on him."
In September, the world watched the ringleader of the July 7 London terrorist attack, his voice inflected with a West Yorkshire accent, preach jihad in English. Al Jazeera aired the communiqu? of 30-year-old Mohammad Sidique Khan, which Khan recorded to explain why he helped murder over 50 of his fellow Britons on a bus and in the Underground. "Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment, and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight," Khan declared. "We are at war. I am a soldier.
Imagine the likelihood of thousands of American students, intellectuals, and Hollywood celebrities marching in support of George W. Bush, and you will begin to appreciate the marvel of the Israeli leftists now rallying around Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Reviled for engineering the Lebanon war, for masterminding the settlement movement, for opposing every attempt at reconciliation with the Palestinians, and as the personification of Israeli militarism and anti-Arab racism, Sharon today is viewed by many leftists as the settlers' bete noire and Israel's foremost champion of peace.
John Ruskin: The Later Years by Tim Hilton (Yale University Press, 656 pp., $35)
A Vision of Britain:
A Personal View of Architecture
by H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
(Doubleday, 160 pp., $40)
This article was originally printed on July 4, 1955
