From the WSJ Opinion Archives
We're
Winning
The State Department has issued its Patterns
of Global Terrorism report for 2002, and it finds, as Voice of America reports,
that "the number of terror attacks declined sharply last year. . . .
There were 199 terrorist attacks last year, a 44 percent drop from 2001 and
the lowest figure in more than 30 years." The total number of deaths was
725, down from nearly 3,300 in 2001, mostly at the World Trade Center. The biggest
terrorist attack was the Bali bombing last October, which killed more than
200.
Here's another indication of how successful America and the rest of the civilized world have been in fighting terror: Today has got to be the slowest news day since at least September 2001. We awoke this morning as usual to CBS Radio's news on the hour, and the lead story was California is the nation's smoggiest state. You don't say! USA Today had the story too, though not on the front page; the paper's lead story is headlined "U.S. Not Ready to Say War Is Over." The specific reference is to Iraq, but this headline would not have been out of place in any day's paper since Sept. 12, 2001.
If you think these stories are boring, though, check out this Onion-worthy Associated Press photo caption:
David Chatham shows off his newly remodeled bathroom in Raleigh, NC Wednesday, April 30, 2003. Chatham believes he'll benefit from the work he's doing on his home in Raleigh, N.C. The bathroom decor, which dated to the mid-1980s, "was really unattractive," he said. So he and his fiancee recently removed the floral wall paper and had the pink tile replaced with tile in a neutral tone.
Just for the heck of it, let's make fun of the Germans. The San Francisco Chronicle reports from Munich that "not so long ago, prominent German politicians were outdoing each other forecasting worst-case scenarios for the Iraq conflict":
On March 21, Social Democratic parliamentary President Wolfgang Thierse, one of the country's most influential leaders, told a Cologne newspaper, "Millions of people in Baghdad will be victims of bombs and rockets."
Environmental Minister Juergen Trittin of the Green Party, the junior partner in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition, grandly declared on Feb. 26, "The German government possesses various studies expecting up to 200,000 victims of military operations in Iraq. And it is feared that another 200,000 persons will die from indirect results of the war."
Greens Co-chair Angelike Beer predicted that "U.S. aggression in Iraq will result in the explosion of the Near and Middle East."
Essen Sie Krähe! Seventy-nine-year-old Peter Scholl-Latour, "who is regarded as Germany's top Mideast expert," asserted on March 29 that "not even 500,000 U.S. soldiers fighting in Vietnam could prevent the debacle there" and that the Iraq war would "last for a very long time." And this guy's Germany's top Mideast expert. Imagine how wrong Germany's lesser Mideast experts got things.
Of course it wasn't only the Germans; plenty of Americans ran around warning of quagmires, massive civilian casualties, explosions of the "Arab street" and who even remembers what else. Instead, just six weeks after the bombs started falling, things are going so smoothly, in Iraq and elsewhere, that journalists are able to turn their attention to such pressing matters as David Chatham's bathroom tiles.
You
Don't Say
"Muslim Groups Dominate U.S. Terror List"--headline, United Press
International, April 30
Don't
Stop Thinking About the Day After Tomorrow
On Tuesday we
noted that John Kerry was "questioning" fellow presidential candidate
Howard "Rubber
Underneath" Dean's "patriotism" because Dean said America
has to take "a different approach" to diplomacy, since "we won't
always have the strongest military." A Boston Globe editorial directs us
to a New York Times story in which Dean tries to clarify his remarks:
He said that in arguing against what he regarded as Mr. Bush's emphasis on military action rather than diplomacy, he had been discussing historic trends in which powers that resorted to unilateral military action rather than diplomacy--including the British and Roman empires--had inevitably been overtaken by other nations.
"Of course we're going to have the strongest military as long as I'm alive, and probably as long as my children are alive," he said today. "But at some point, if we continue to push only military options, we're not going to have the strongest military because other countries will overtake us."
According to Who2.com, Dean, 54, has two children, Anne and Paul, born in 1984 and 1986 respectively. Let's say both of them live to be 75. That means that if Dean is right, America will have the world's strongest military at least until 2061, 58 years from now. Is it realistic for any political leader to make policy today based on assumptions about what the world will look like nearly six decades hence?
As it happens, 58 years ago it was 1945, the year of the United Nations' founding. Whatever one might think of the U.N., one certainly cannot fault the men who started it for having failed to foresee how it would become a threat to world peace and an obstacle to American action today. And the guys who started the U.N. had just won a war. Dean, in contrast, has just been proved spectacularly wrong in opposing the liberation of Iraq. It is as if in 1945 Charles Lindbergh or or Jeannette Rankin were claiming to speak authoritatively about how to prepare America for the challenges of 2003.
Thanks
for the Memories
Lately Sen. John Kerry has been boasting to feminist groups that his first speech
on the Senate floor trumpeted his support for Roe v. Wade and the right
to abort. But it turns out the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat,
who by the way served in Vietnam, was mistaken. The Boston Globe reports that
although the wet-behind-the-ears lawmaker "entered a written statement"
backing Roe on Jan. 22, 1985, the decision's 12th anniversary, "the
Congressional Record shows that Kerry's first speech in the Senate, on March
19, 1985, was made in opposition to President Reagan's push to build 21 MX missiles."
So Kerry's first priority in the Senate was to weaken America's military--and he has the nerve to question Howard Dean's patriotism?
Change
in Plans
The Associated Press reports from Baghdad that Jay Garner, the retired general
who's serving as Iraq's administrator, "told reporters Americans should
be proud of the quick military victory in Iraq. 'I was planning on having the
oilfields torched and facing a huge humanitarian crisis, but the oilfields were
not torched and there is no humanitarian crisis,' said Garner." Good thing
he didn't follow through on his plans for the oilfields.
I
Cinco, Therefore I Ammo
"The decision against holding a Cinco de Mayo celebration next week at
the White House, after having such events the past two years, was not meant
as a snub at Mexico for opposing the U.S.-led war with Iraq, a presidential
spokesman said Wednesday," reports the Associated Press.
We believe it, but we really wish the White House would reconsider. After all, as the AP explains, "Cinco de Mayo--in English the fifth of May--celebrates the victory of Mexican soldiers over the French at the 1862 Battle of Puebla." The White House should hold the Cinco de Mayo fiesta as a snub against France.
Saudi
Chutzpah
Here's something a little different: the first Best of the Web Today blind tasting.
See if you can identify the vintage and origin of this fine whine:
During this crisis patriotism as practiced in the United States reached alarming levels of intolerance and violence. The right of the other to dissent was unceremoniously thrown aside. If we take what happened to the Dixie Chicks as an example, one is hard-pressed to justify or even comprehend the incident. One of the ladies said she was ashamed of Bush being from her home state of Texas. She said it while performing on a stage in London. Had the Chicks been living under Saddam, we know a priori what would have happened. But knowing they lived in the United States one thought that the debate would have maintained a semblance of civility.
Instead, they were attacked, taken off radio stations, and callers to the same stations spewed so much venom that it inevitably culminated in on-the-air death threats. Obviously, democracy is skin deep.
California 2003? Nope, Saudi Arabia. It's an Arab News op-ed by one Mohammad T. Al-Rasheed. If the Dixie Chicks lived in Rasheed's country, of course, they would not even have been able to go to Britain to deliver their anti-Bush comments unless they had the permission of their "guardians"--fathers or husbands. Nor would they be allowed to drive, appear naked on magazine covers or even show their ankles in public.
All
in the Family
Saudis are awakening to "the perils of inbreeding," reports the New
York Times. Serious genetic disorders "are common in Saudi Arabia, where
women have an average of six children and where in some regions more than half
of the marriages are between close relatives":
Across the Arab world today an average of 45 percent of married couples are related, according to Dr. Nadia Sakati, a pediatrician and senior consultant for the genetics research center at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh.
In some parts of Saudi Arabia, particularly in the south, where Mrs. Hefthi was raised, the rate of marriage among blood relatives ranges from 55 to 70 percent, among the highest rates in the world, according to the Saudi government.
Widespread inbreeding in Saudi Arabia has produced several genetic disorders, Saudi public health officials said, including the blood diseases of thalassemia, a potentially fatal hemoglobin deficiency, and sickle cell anemia. Spinal muscular atrophy and diabetes are also common, especially in the regions with the longest traditions of marriage between relatives. Dr. Sakati said she had also found links between inbreeding and deafness and muteness.
Interestingly, one factor the Times doesn't mention is the prevalence of polygamy among Saudi elites.
Speed
Trap
So the "roadmap" for Middle East peace is finally out. Does anyone
else find it overly optimistic? The roadmap identifies "Phase I" as
"Ending Terror And Violence, Normalizing Palestinian Life, and Building
Palestinian Institutions." The time frame for this phase? "Present
to May 2003." You've got 30 more days, guys; good luck.
Can
You Keep a Secret?
"Bush Envoy on Secret Israel Visit" reads a headline in today's Jerusalem
Post. "US President George W. Bush's Middle East point man, Elliott Abrams,
is in Israel on a very discreet visit," the paper reports. Shhh, keep this
under your hat. It's just between you, us and the Jerusalem Post's readership.
Time, meanwhile, reported yesterday that it had "learned that sometime today the FBI plans to send a classified Intelligence Bulletin to 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies over its secure telecommunications network, advising officials to pay attention to suspicious activities around nuclear power plants." Whatever you do, don't tell Newsweek!
Zero-Tolerance
Watch
In an effort to crack down on "public displays of affection" among
her students at Peterson Elementary School in Klamath Falls, Ore., sixth-grade
teacher Mary Bond decreed that "there would be no talking between boys
and girls," reports Portland's KATU-TV. The kids staged a protest:
Monday morning brought a group of them standing just outside school grounds, silently hoisting protest signs bearing slogans like, "Speak to whomever, whenever," and "Freedom of Speech."
"I was totally into this thing, that everyone needs to not take it because (the ban) was so dumb," said 12-year-old Sarah Manes, who helped organize the Monday morning group.
The principal lifted the ban, which seems like discrimination-lawsuit bait anyway.
This
Just In
"Shuttle Crew Was Doomed"--headline, Orlando Sentinel, May 1
Better
Dead Than Read
"China has prepared a reading list for people staying at home after karaoke
parlors and cinemas were shut to stem the spread of SARS," Reuters reports:
Volumes such as the "16th Party Congress Report," former President Jiang Zemin's "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" and "A History of the Chinese Communist Party" headed the list of nearly 100 titles, compiled by China's publishing regulator.
We suppose being forced to read commie propaganda tomes would make more palatable the idea of death from SARS.
(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Rahul Giri, Stephen Nuño, Judie Amsel, Bob Krumm, Natalie Cohen, Barak Moore, Mark Schulze, Damian Bennett, Edward Schulze, Daniel Goldstein, Glenn Bialik, Todd Eberle, Mara Gold, Yitzchak Dorfman, Bruce Oakley, Michael Dowding, Court Michau, Shelley Taylor, Pat Mizell, Marie Bourgeois, Anita Parillo, Mike Forrester, Robert LeChevalier, E.B.S. Hirsch, Joshua Weiner, Michael Segal, Cliff Thier, Joel Goldberg, Carl Sherer, Yussi Mosak, Jenifer Sawicki, Reagan Lynch, Steve Ginnings, Michael Kingsley and Paul Cooper. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Bret Stephens: Abu Mazen's strength is his lack of strength.
- John Fund: SARS panic spreads faster than the virus itself.
- Dorothy Rabinowitz: Fallen warriors remind us why whiny celebs are irrelevant.
