From the WSJ Opinion Archives
You're
on Your Own, Pals
The Palestinian Arabs have once again succeeded in isolating themselves by backing
the wrong side in a war, argues the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh:
The Palestinians and Hizbullah feel that their Arab brethren have once again turned their backs on them. On Monday, hundreds of Palestinians who marched in downtown Ramallah in support of Hizbullah chanted: "Hassan Nasrallah is our hero, the rest of the Arab leaders are cowards" and "O beloved Abu Hadi [Nasrallah's nickname], bomb, bomb Tel Aviv." The second battle cry is reminiscent of the famous slogan the Palestinians used during the first Gulf War: "O beloved Saddam, bomb, bomb Tel Aviv." . . .
Tarek Hamo, [a] prominent Arab commentator, mocked Nasrallah, drawing parallels between him and ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. "The statements of Hassan Nasrallah remind me of the statements made by Saddam Hussein on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq," he said. "Saddam, whose army generals fled their positions in Baghdad just before the invasion, also issued threats to destroy the Americans if they entered Baghdad. Nasrallah is now in hiding and his fate won't be better than that of Saddam, whose was hiding in a deep hole."
Even the erstwhile Iraqi dictator is not backing the Hezbollah honcho, according to Deutsche Presse-Agentur, the German wire service:
Toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has issued a warning to the Syrian leadership "not to go too far in its alliance with Iran," blaming Tehran for the current flare-up of violence in the Middle East, the head of Saddam's defence team claimed Tuesday.
"The president told us that the Syrian leadership should not go too far in its alliance with Iran, because the Persians harbour bad intentions for all Arabs and aspire to see them vanquished," he said.
"The Israeli aggression on Lebanon and the Palestinians is a natural result for what happened to Iraq with Iranian backing," Saddam reportedly said, alluding to the US-led invasion of Iraq that resulted in the ouster of his regime in April 2003.
Saddam supposedly goes on to offer a rather bizarre conspiracy theory about the U.S., Israel and Iran working in concert. By contrast, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, editor in chief of Kuwait's Arab Times, expressly endorses Jerusalem's self-defense:
A battle between supporters and opponents of these adventurers has begun, starting from Palestine to Tehran passing through Syria and Lebanon. This war was inevitable as the Lebanese government couldn't bring Hezbollah within its authority and make it work for the interests of Lebanon. Similarly leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas has been unable to rein in the Hamas Movement.
Unfortunately we must admit that in such a war the only way to get rid of "these irregular phenomena" is what Israel is doing. The operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon are in the interest of people of Arab countries and the international community.
Ha'aretz reports that in Gaza City the "Arab street" is rising up against the Arab League: "Militant women burned Israeli, U.S., British, and EU flags. In an unprecedented step they also defaced an Arab League flag, which they then proceeded to set ablaze."
Sounds as though the Arabs need a constitutional amendment!
Europe
Wakes Up?
Chicago Sun-Times columnist John O'Sullivan says Iran's proxy war against Israel
may mean "the beginning of the end" of "the anti-Israel orthodoxy
of European politics":
In the last week, however, all [Europe's] assumptions were suddenly undermined. Israel found itself under attack precisely because it had made the sacrifices that Europeans regularly demand. Its voluntary withdrawal from southern Lebanon was seen by Hezbollah as an Arab victory and a sign of Israeli weakness. The withdrawal also brought Hezbollah right up to the border from which it could launch missiles into the heart of Israel. And somebody had given Hezbollah longer-range missiles capable of hitting major cities such as Tel Aviv.
Who? Well, as the G-8 statement makes clear, Iran. . . .
Europe, in short, is beginning to wake up to the Iranian threat and its terrorist aspects. Shortly after this crisis began, hard-headed European analysts such as the Daily Telegraph's Con Coughlin pointed out that Iran had almost certainly orchestrated this crisis to distract attention at the G-8 and the U.N. from its nuclear progress and wider ambitions. The sudden outbreak of realism at the G-8 suggests that Bush, Blair, Chirac, Germany's Angela Merkel and even Putin share Coughlin's analysis. Maybe they even hope that Israel will reduce their problems by saving Lebanon from Hezbollah rule and Iranian manipulation. They should.
However, a Jerusalem Post report suggests that one European country is engaging in a bit of unilateralism:
France sent Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to Beirut on Monday to express support for Lebanon, President Jacques Chirac's office said. . . .
On Friday, President Jacques Chirac said that the [Israel Defense Forces'] actions in Lebanon were "totally disproportionate" and asked whether destroying Lebanon was not the ultimate goal.
"One could ask if today there is not a sort of will to destroy Lebanon, its equipment, its roads, its communication," Chirac said during an interview in the garden of the presidential Elysee Palace to mark Bastille Day, the French national holiday.
Chirac had better be careful lest he squander the world's goodwill.
Deep
Thoughts--I
Markos "Kos" Moulitsas, one of the intellectual giants of the Democratic
Party, offers this analysis of the current conflict:
It's clear that in the Middle East, no one is sick of the fighting. They have centuries of grudges to resolve, and will continue fighting until they can get over them. And considering that they obviously have no interest in "getting over them," we're stuck with a war that will not end in any forseable [sic] future. It doesn't matter what we bloggers say. It doesn't matter what the President of the United States says. Or the United Nations. Or the usual bloviating gasbag pundits.
When two sides are this dead-set on killing each other, very little can get in the way.
In fairness, not all Democrats share Moulitsas's view that Israelis and terrorists are morally equivalent. The Associated Press reports that Sen. Hillary Clinton offered a rousing defense of the Jewish state at a New York rally yesterday:
"We are here to show solidarity and support for Israel," Senator Clinton told thousands of people who rallied outside the UN offices in New York. "We will stand with Israel, because Israel is standing for American values as well as Israeli ones." . . .
"I want us to imagine if extremist terrorists were launching rockets across the Mexican or Canadian borders," she said.
"Would we stand by, or defend ourselves against the extremists?" . . .
"America will support Israel in her efforts to send a message to Hamas, Hezbollah, to the Syrians, to the Iranians--to all who seek death and domination instead of life and freedom--that we will not permit this to happen and we will take whatever steps are necessary," she said.
Political observers sometimes wonder why Jewish voters remain so staunchly Democratic even though the Republicans are now the more staunchly pro-Israel of the two parties. Maybe Jews know that their votes are the only thing that keeps the Democrats from going completely over to Kos Cuckoo Land.
Deep
Thoughts--II
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof--whose column isn't available online
but is quoted by Editor & Publisher--is skeptical about Israel's war against
Hezbollah:
It's not clear what Israel can achieve militarily in Lebanon. The 12,000 missiles controlled by Hezbollah are not kept in arsenals, but in unmarked homes and garages, so it's uncertain that Israel will be able to destroy very many. If Israel continues with a limited air war for a couple of weeks, it will produce enough television footage of bleeding Lebanese to anger the world, but not enough to achieve any substantial shift in power on the ground.
But get a load of his solution:
If Israel is ever to achieve real security, we have a pretty good idea how it will be achieved: the kind of two-state solution reached in the private Geneva accord of 2003 between Arab and Israeli peaceniks. The fighting in Lebanon pushes that possibility even farther away--and in that sense, each bombing mission harms Israel's future as well as Lebanon's.
A two-state solution! Brilliant! Why didn't we think of that?
Just one problem: There are two states involved here. The second one is called "Lebanon," and it is playing host to Hezbollah. Better go back to the drawing board, Nick.
Deep
Thoughts--III
"For the moment none of the players wants the fighting to spread beyond
the borders of Lebanon," writes Mideast expert Anton LaGuardia in London's
Daily Telegraph.
The Israelis hunkering down in bomb shelters will certainly be relieved to hear this.
Payback
for Impeachment?
Why is the Angry Left so angry at Joe Lieberman? The prevailing view is that
it is because he supported, and still supports, the liberation of Iraq, but
The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg offers an alternative explanation. Democrats,
he argues, are sore about "a speech he delivered in the Senate on September
3, 1998," criticizing President Clinton for his improper sexual relationship
with a low-level employee:
It was an exceedingly pompous performance, in which the Senator expressed his "deep disappointment and personal anger" at President Clinton for his sad, furtive affair with a White House intern and deplored "the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations." The speech earned Lieberman plaudits for statesmanship, integrity, independence, and the like; some people actually saw it as a service to the Democratic Party and even to the President, on the ground that it separated the former from the latter and redirected a little of the anti-Clinton feeling from demands for immediate impeachment (which Lieberman rejected as "unjust and unwise") to mere indignation.
Others, however, saw Lieberman's attack on Clinton--for, among other things, embodying a "mind-set that has helped to threaten the integrity and stability of the family"--as sanctimonious and even a trifle hypocritical.
The jejune blogger Duncan "Atrios" Black echoes the point in a Los Angeles Times op-ed:
Lieberman has a long history of providing cover for the worst of Republican actions while enthusiastically serving as his own party's scold. After the Senate acquitted President Clinton on all impeachment charges, Lieberman called for his censure.
Actually, the senator who introduced the postimpeachment resolution to censure Clinton was California's Dianne Feinstein; Lieberman was only one of 37 co-sponsors, more than three-fourths of whom were Democrats. Probably it is Lieberman's "sanctimonious" speech that is causing Black to remember him as a censure leader.
In any case, this was all more than seven years ago. Isn't it, if we may coin a phrase, "time to move on"? It's not even as if there's any principle at stake here for the left. After all, those who defended Clinton were by and large the same people who another septennial earlier attacked Clarence Thomas because he was the target of unsubstantiated allegations of having made ribald remarks yet another decade or so before.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
"The CIA analyst, whom we'll call 'Paula Jones' because her real name, Valerie Plame, is secret (known only, as Bob Novak notes, to readers of Who's Who in America), is the wife of Joe Wilson, whom the Kerry campaign jettisoned after his claims about the liberation of Iraq and Jones's involvement in his junket to Niger were discredited."--Best of the Web Today, July 17
"Valerie Plame Is Paula Jones"--headline, San Francisco Chronicle, July 18
Can
You Dig It?
From an Associated Press dispatch on Boston's Big Dig:
Although it's been considered an engineering marvel, the project also has also been plagued by leaks, falling debris, cost overruns, delays and problems linked to faulty construction.
And you know, other than the leaks, the falling debris, the cost overruns, the delays, the faulty construction and the problems linked to the faulty construction, it is an engineering marvel!
World
Ends, Etc.
"Ethanol Boom Could Hurt World's Poor--Expert"--headline, Reuters,
July 13
Already
Been Done
"Pope Benedict Writing Book on Jesus"--headline, Reuters, July 18
Good
Question
"Who to Play Virgin Festival in Baltimore"--headline, Associated Press,
July 17
What
Was the First Clue?
"Volcano Found as Etna Erupts"--headline, Times (London), July 18
Say
What?
"Cingular Chair Stand-Off Heats Up"--headline, Boston Herald, July 12
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "Oprah Says She and Friend Not Gay"--headline, Associated
Press, July 17
- "Mountain Biker Calls 911 From Cell Phone After Getting Lost"--headline,
KNBC-TV
Web site (Los Angeles), July 17
- "No New Records Set at Jerusalem Grand Prix"--headline, Jerusalem
Post, July 17
- "Australians Upset Over Loud Manilow Music"--headline, Associated
Press, July 17
- "Guy Confuses Sumo With American TV Wrestling"--headline, Reuters,
July 17
- "Deputy's Missing Badge Is Sought"--headline, Statesman
Journal (Salem, Ore.), July 18
- "Antanas Valionis Might Be Appointed Ambassador to Portugal"--Baltic Times (Riga, Latvia), July 14
Of
Course You Realize This Means War
"A 46-year-old man is accused of assaulting his wife with a carrot, causing
her to lose sight in one eye," reports the Associated Press from Monroe,
Conn.:
Pamela Vecsey, 46, underwent six outs [sic] of surgery after being hit in the left eye with the vegetable Saturday night, but doctors were not able to restore her vision, prosecutor Stephanie Damiani said.
The couple was arguing when Roderick Vecsey tossed the carrot, Damiani said.
It is a scandal that thanks to the carrot lobby, Americans--even the mentally ill, convicted criminals and stalkers--are able to buy these dangerous weapons without so much as a license or background check. We need carrot control! It's the only way to deal with crime at its roots.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Segal, Ed Lasky, Brendan Schulman, E.B.S. Hirsch, Thom Seaton, Shelley Taylor, Jared Silverman, Tom Massey, Orin Ryssman, Bob O'Hara, David Darby, Dan O'Shea, Steve Stephens, Allan Nadel, Samuel Walker, William Jones, John Sinnott, Ethel Fenig, Robert Firriolo, Brian Azman, Dori Monson, Brendan O'Scannlain, Ed Diaz, Abe Shapiro, Dave Huber, Daniel Foty and Dennis Powell. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Iran's mullahs reply to Condi Rice's nuclear olive branch.
- Mohammad Fadhil (from Iraq the Model): Iran is the cause of chaos in Lebanon and Iraq.
- William Tucker: Andy Kessler wonders why medicine can't be more like computers.
