From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, May 6, 2003 4:15 P.M. EDT

Bring Back Saddam!
Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman, sharing space on today's New York Times op-ed page, have different versions of the same column, a sure sign that liberal conventional wisdom has gelled. The moods are different: Kristof is pensive, while Krugman is splenetic (but isn't he always)? Basically, both of them are pounding the table over the coalition's "failure" thus far to unearth weapons of mass destruction in liberated Iraq.

Now, of course, this could mean a lot of things. It could mean the weapons have been found but tests are still under way to confirm what they are. It could mean the weapons are well hidden. It could mean that Saddam's cronies destroyed them or spirited them away to Syria before the coalition arrived. It could mean intelligence agencies made honest mistakes and overestimated the degree of Iraq's weapons programs. It could even mean--hey, it's logically possible, anyway--that Saddam destroyed the weapons years ago but didn't bother informing the U.N., as mandated under Security Council resolutions.

To Kristof and Krugman, however, there's only one possibility worth considering: President Bush lied. "I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit," Kristof writes pensively--but it's hard to believe Kristof isn't lying about his desires, since he's writing a column suggesting just that, based on thin evidence.

Anyway, given Kristof's and Krugman's track record, the fact that both of them think President Bush lied bolsters our confidence in his honesty. (Besides, we thought presidents were allowed to lie. Or is that only when they're under oath?) In any case, before these guys complain about the coalition's failure to find weapons of mass destruction, wouldn't it behoove them to wait at least as long as they wanted to give the U.N. inspectors?

Here's a thought: Let's revisit this issue a year from now. If coalition troops still haven't found weapons of mass destruction next May, then we'll concede the argument may have some merit. And there's a way to test it. The Democratic nominee, whoever he is, can make righting this wrong his top promise if elected. Sounds like a winning rallying cry: Bring back Saddam!

Assuming, that is, that he ever existed.

Weasel Watch--I
"The French government secretly supplied fleeing Iraqi officials with passports in Syria that allowed them to escape to Europe," the Washington Times reports:

The passports are regarded as documents of the European Union, because of France's membership in the union, and have helped the Iraqis avoid capture, said officials familiar with intelligence reports. . . .

It made it very difficult to track these people," one official said.

A second Bush administration official said, "It's like Raoul Wallenberg in reverse," a reference to the Swedish diplomat who supplied travel documents to help Jews escape Nazi Germany in World War II. "Now you have the French helping the bad guys escape from us."

France denies the report--but if it turns out to be true, one has to wonder what the fugitives in question know about prior French collaboration with Saddam's regime.

Take the Money and Run
"In the hours before American bombs began falling on the Iraqi capital, one of President Saddam Hussein's sons and a close adviser carried off nearly $1 billion in cash from the country's Central Bank," reports the New York Times. Qusay Hussein, Saddam's younger son (and the sane one, compared with Uday at least), "presided over the seizure of the money, along with Abid al-Hamid Mahmood, the president's personal assistant":

The sheer volume of the cash was so greatósome $900 million in American $100 bills and as much as $100 million worth of eurosóthat three tractor-trailers were needed to cart it off, the Iraqi official said. It took a team of workers two hours to load up the cash. Their work was completed before employees of the downtown Baghdad bank arrived for work.

Of course, this will get nowhere near the attention that the looting of Iraq's National Museum did. That story, though, is turning out to be another Jenin "massacre." The Chicago Tribune reports that "a total of 38 pieces, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing." Oh well, what are a few orders of magnitude when you're fighting American imperialism?

You Don't Say
"Criminal Groups Suspected of Iraq Antiquities Theft, Says US Official"--headline, VOANews.com, May 6

Weasel Watch--II
Remember Mikhail Gorbachev? He was "Man of the Decade" a few decades back but is now largely forgotten. The Associated Press reports he's turned up in Hamburg, Germany, where he complained that, in the AP's words, "the United States cast aside international law by going to war in Iraq without United Nations approval":

Gorbachev praised resistance to the war in the U.N. Security Council by Russia, France and Germany, telling reporters the three countries "showed great responsibility and were correct."

"International law was cast aside," the former Soviet leader said. "The country that made democracy its banner ignored the majority."

Gorbachev, calling for the Security Council to take control of postwar Iraq, accused Washington of "imperial behavior."

We know, we know. Nobody cares what this irrelevant old fossil has to say about the irrelevant den of weasels over at Turtle Bay. We brought the subject up only to point out what's really got Gorby's goat, namely this Pravda headline: "Polish Forces Reach Euphrates."

Weasel Watch--III
"The strained relations between Germany and the United States took a turn for the worse yesterday after a senior Berlin diplomat was reported to have told Foreign Ministry colleagues that America was turning into a 'police state,' " reports the Times of London. Well, if anyone knows police states, it's the Germans.

Dementia Watch
A long-running feature of this column is "Stupidity Watch," but we're starting to think we may have misnamed it. Some of the people we're talking about might be of below-average intelligence, but most of them are crazy. Take MSNBC columnist Jill Nelson--please:

These days, a sense of apprehension and foreboding lurks in the back of my head and the pit of my stomach. Itís a gut-wrenching reminder that something very bad has happened and is about to happen anew. It is an anticipation of the next insult and injury in an America that has been defined under the Bush administration by a profound meanness of spirit. . . .

Three years ago, before the bloodless coup díetat that made George W. Bush president, America was a far-from-perfect nation. Yet there was the possibility, almost gone now, that our country might evolve into a place that lived up to its loftiest democratic rhetoric. Today, I live in an America that makes my stomach hurt and fills me with terror. A nation run by greedy, frightened, violent bullies. It is time to take our country back before it is too late.

See what we mean? The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, quotes Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a Bay Area Democrat, as saying a "fundamentalist revolution" has taken place in Washington. These are not compassionate people," Tauscher says of her imaginary enemies. "They break glass wherever they go. They have a very narrow, very right wing, very ideologically driven agenda that is completely incongruent with what the American people believe."

She adds: "They would put nuclear tips on ice cream cones, if they could." Actually, come to think of it, that would be kinda cool.

John Kerry, Europhile
The Washington Post's Lloyd Grove previews an Elle magazine article about Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Sen. John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam. For those of you who think our stock description of the senator is too harsh--and there are a few of you, believe it or not--consider this quote:

The candidate, meanwhile, praises the prospective first lady as "nurturing and incredibly loving, and fun, zany, witty. . . . Definitely sexy. Very earthy, sexy, European. She knows how to speak with her eyes."

European? Does the senator have something against American women? Or for that matter, African or Asian ones?

Zero-Tolerance Watch
Administrators at Park Ridge Elementary School in Nampa, Idaho, have ordered 11-year-old Ethan Jansen to stop wearing a patriotic T-shirt to school. "The T-shirt depicts a monument at the Fort Lewis military base in Washington state. It shows 'Iron mike' hoisting a rifle with a star in the background," reports Boise's KBCI-TV. "School officials say pictures showing gangs or guns are not allowed in school."

Affirmative Action
Back in the mid-1990s, the University of California system abolished its racial-preference programs, which discriminated against white and Asian applicants, who were supposedly "overrepresented." Now UC's flagship Berkeley campus has come up with a new way to keep Asian numbers down: It's banning students from Red China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan on the ground that they might be SARS carriers.

Yeah, Who Says?
"WHO Says SARS Still on the Rise in China"--headline, Associated Press, May 6

Reuters Cooks the Numbers
Bush judicial nominees Miguel Estrada and Priscilla Owen both have the support of a majority of senators, but undemocratic Democrats are using the filibuster to prevent their confirmations from coming to a vote. Yesterday, however, they did approve the nomination of Deborah Cook for the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, on what Reuters calls "a largely party-line vote of 66-25."

In Reuterville, where Osama bin Laden is no terrorist, a "largely party-line vote" is one in which Democrats split 17-25.

It Must Be Mourning, Because the Rooster Isn't Crowing
California is in the midst of a budget crisis, and Gov. Gray Davis is eager to raise taxes. The Associated Press, meanwhile, reports from Riverside, Calif., that "a state and federal task force has begun to offer grief therapy to poultry owners whose birds were killed in order to stave off the spread of Exotic Newcastle Disease." Californians may be overtaxed, but at least they can't complain their money isn't well spent.

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Judie Amsel, Steven Platzer, Martin McPhillips, Robert LeChevalier, Scott Jordan, Rosanne Klass, Craig Berkowitz, S.E. Brenner, Yan Mogilyansky, Damian Bennett, Jennifer Ray, Jim Orheim, Pat Mizell, David Darby, Jeffrey Shapiro, Monty Krieger, Michael Siegel, Joel Goldberg, Steve Ginnings, Mark Schulze, Raghu Desikan, John Hartness, David Schlosser, Russell DePalma, Edward Himmelfarb, Elliot Ganz, Howard Weiser, Charles Johnson, Sue Pierce, Shelley Taylor, Yehudah Urbach, Mara Gold, Carl Sherer, Michael Segal, Anita Parillo, Russell Harris, N. Eckert, William Katz, Philip Bowermaster, Bonnie Roskes, Charlie Gaylord, Steve Shirley, Edward Schulze, Christopher Arfaa, James Perry, Bruce Oakley, Aviva Ross, Darrell Root, Linda Tinney, Jeff Roby, Leonid Kontorovich, Erik Moy, Steven Getman, C.E. Dobkin, Al Kaplan and Alan James. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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