From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, November 9, 2001 3:15 P.M. EST

'My Fellow Americans, Let's Roll'
President Bush's speech last night had a nice coda:

Above all, we will live in a spirit of courage and optimism. Our nation was born in that spirit, as immigrants yearning for freedom courageously risked their lives in search of greater opportunity. That spirit of optimism and courage still beckons people across the world who want to come here. And that spirit of optimism and courage must guide those of us fortunate enough to live here.

Courage and optimism led the passengers on Flight 93 to rush their murderers to save lives on the ground. Led by a young man whose last known words were the Lord's Prayer and "Let's roll." He didn't know he had signed on for heroism when he boarded the plane that day. Some of our greatest moments have been acts of courage for which no one could have ever prepared.

We will always remember the words of that brave man, expressing the spirit of a great country. We will never forget all we have lost, and all we are fighting for. Ours is the cause of freedom. We've defeated freedom's enemies before, and we will defeat them again.

We cannot know every turn this battle will take. Yet we know our cause is just and our ultimate victory is assured. We will, no doubt, face new challenges. But we have our marching orders: My fellow Americans, let's roll.

An Alliance Victory?
The Northern Alliance is claiming its first major victory. Gen. Rashid Dostum says his troops have entered the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif after a battle in which 90 Taliban were killed. There's no independent confirmation of Dostum's claim.

About That Clinton Speech . . .
Georgetown University has put a transcript of Bill Clinton's Wednesday speech online. We weren't able to get though the whole thing (it's over 7,600 words!), but we read enough to convince us that the Washington Times account, which we noted yesterday, was unfair. Clinton expressed support for America in the war effort, and not in the equivocal I-don't-mean-to-minimize-Sept.-11-but manner that's common among the blame-America bunch. And he clearly did not say, as the Times may have left the impression he did, that Sept. 11 was the "price" for America's sins. Here's the full passage in question:

Terror, the killing of noncombatants for economic, political, or religious reasons has a very long history as long as organized combat itself, and yet it has never succeeded as a military strategy standing on its own, but it has been around a long time. Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told to today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.

Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were, quite frequently, killed even though they were innocent. This country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human and we are still paying the price today. Even in the 20th century in America people were terrorized or killed because of their race. And even today, though we have continued to walk, sometimes to stumble, in the right direction, we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history.

This is incoherent--Clinton manages to expand the definition of terrorism to the point of meaninglessness--but it's far from seditious. Still, if the ex-president is going to go around giving speeches in a time of war, would it be too much to ask that he hire a tough editor so that his words will end up making sense? If he gives muddled speeches, not only his enemies but America's can read their own meaning into them; see, for example, this Arab News account, which interprets Clinton's speech more or less as the Washington Times did. Like President Bush's unfortunate use of the word "crusade," this is the kind of thing that can feed enemy propaganda efforts.

Chelsea's Friends the British
Talk magazine publishes Chelsea Clinton's first article, a reflection Sept. 11. The article isn't available online, but CNN and the Washington Post both have some quotes from it. "It's hard to be abroad right now," writes the erstwhile first daughter, who's studying at Oxford. "Every day I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling. Sometimes it's from other students, sometimes it's from a newspaper columnist, sometimes it's from 'peace' demonstrators."

Chelsea, who was in Manhattan on Sept. 11, adds that as the World Trade Center towers were collapsing she thought of Humpty Dumpty: "I am still unsure about what Humpty Dumpty represented to me on that day, because I do not subscribe to--and I even resent--the theory that America's arrogance, even indirectly, led to the attacks. It just seemed as though the world were falling down, like Humpty Dumpty."

She claims she found time to ponder fiscal policy even as she was moving uptown: "I was expounding on the detriments of Bush's tax cut as we approached Grand Central Terminal and were met with hordes of people running out of the station." But then her thoughts turned to more immediate matters: "Once we stopped running, I started praying. . . . I stopped berating the tax cut and started praying that the president would rise to lead us. And I thanked God my mother was a senator representing New York and that Rudy Giuliani was our mayor. I have never reacted more viscerally to a leader, particularly not to one I had been criticizing just the day before for some insensitivity or other." (We assume she's referring to Rudy and not Hillary.)

The Drudge Report says Chelsea's account of Sept. 11 conflicts with that of her mother, who told NBC's "Dateline": "She had gone on what she thought would be a great jog. She was going down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She was going to get a cup of coffee and--that's when the plane hit!" Says Drudge: "In fact, Chelsea writes that she was at her friend's apartment on Park Avenue South--miles from Ground Zero--when she learned of the attacks!" Of course, we wouldn't dream of calling Hillary a liar. After all, kids aren't always entirely truthful with their parents.

John McCain's Friends the Saudis
A commentator for the Arab News, an English-language Saudi paper, pens a defensive response to The Wall Street Journal's editorial "The Saudi Contradiction." This passage tickled us:

In respect of political rights, Saudi Arabia has steered away from the electoral system as the only form of representative government. Instead, it has chosen a Shoura (Advisory) Council with all the powers, prerogatives and functions of a parliamentary system.

The Council drafts laws, conducts hearings and passes legislation just as the US Congress does. Its 120 members are drawn from a cross-section of the Saudi population. The benefit of this system is to guarantee the selection of members on the basis of honesty and standing in the community, unrelated to the influence of special interest groups and financial contributions. Senator John McCain would be advised to take a look at the system. He might like what he would see.

Our Friends the Iranians?
Mixed signals from Tehran: London's Telegraph picks up a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung report that Iran is "withdrawing more than 700 secret service officials and military instructors stationed abroad in a gesture of solidarity with the American campaign against Osama bin Laden." Iran's Revolutionary Guards and other units would leave Sudan, Lebanon, Bosnia and other countries under the plan, which the FAZ, quoting Western security sources, says was ordered by the Supreme National Security Council, headed by President Mohammad Khatami, in mid-October. But a spokesman for the Iranian Embassy in Berlin says he's unaware of any such plan.

Does He See More Than Does Seymour?
Slate's Scott Shuger, a former naval intelligence officer, disputes Seymour Hersh's account of the purportedly disastrous Delta Force raid on a complex used by top Talib Mullah Omar:

Even if Hersh is right about the number and extent of casualties, the view that they would constitute a near-disaster is wrong. Special operations missions into bad-guy country are extremely dangerous, and their planners and participants expect casualties. Plus, post-9/11, the political tolerance for losses has been raised considerably. (And why is Hersh flogging the old standard?) Therefore, any mission in Afghanistan that didn't result in fatalities could hardly be rated a disaster.

In the absence of official comment, there is, of course, no way to know conclusively whether the raiders succeeded in inserting an undercover team. But if Hersh is suggesting that the United States has, in general, been incapable of such covert insertions, he's almost surely wrong. Many press reports, none denied by the Pentagon, have spoken of small teams of U.S. and British commandos operating inside Afghanistan, and the recently stepped-up U.S. bombing in support of Northern Alliance troops operating along a quickly changing front strongly suggests that U.S. operatives are designating targets from the ground.

A Beautiful Bomb
The Weekly Standard's Victorino Matus writes an ode to the Daisy Cutter. The "world's largest non-nuclear bomb," it "costs $27,000, is about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and weighs 15,000 pounds. Its manufacturer is classified--as is the number of Daisy Cutters in the U.S. inventory. But we do know how it works"--so well that a British soldier in the Gulf War, after witnessing the detonation of a Daisy cutter, reportedly said: "My God, the Yanks are using nukes!"

OPEC's Declining Power
How come oil prices have gone down since Sept. 11, when every past Middle East crisis has led to price increases? Lynne Kiesling the Reason Public Policy Institute says it's because oil producers outside OPEC and the Persian Gulf have grown in importance:

Instead of working within OPEC in the past couple of weeks to restrict output, which they know would be an unprofitable strategy in a global recession, Saudi Arabia has taken to appealing to non-OPEC producers to restrict their output to raise world prices, particularly Norway, Russia, and Mexico. Russia and Norway are the second and third largest oil exporters in the world, respectively. . . .

In response to Saudi Arabia's recent request to restrict their output, Russia, Norway and Mexico have all declined. Saudi Arabia has also approached Angola, to no avail. The emergence of non-OPEC competitors over the past decade has seriously limited OPEC's ability to influence global oil markets, and their political alliances being forged with the U.S. gives added weight to incentives not to restrict oil output.

Heads They Win, Tails U.S. Lose
Victor Davis Hanson, whose prolific contributions to National Review Online have been some of the best wartime commentary on the Web, takes apart America-haters' analysis, according to which the U.S. can do no right:

Pundits here and abroad wax on about how we "created bin Laden" and then "abandoned Afghanistan." They should look at histories of the Soviet invasion written during the 1980s. . . . What once was seen as principled assistance to indigenous underdogs now is reinvented as cynical CIA machinations--"chickens coming home to roost." Of course, had we done nothing to help the Afghanis [sic], we would then have been scolded that we were amoral Kissingerians, who did not think dying children in Afghanistan were worth confronting the wrath of the Soviet Union. Had we stayed on to create democracy we would have been dubbed naive "nation-builders," intent on idealistic secularism in a fundamentalist society. And so we pulled out our military assistance, kept giving millions of dollars in food aid, and accepted the charge that we had "ignored" our "friends," all the while "giving aid to the Taliban."

On the topic of America "creating bin Laden," we went back to the archives and found an a Dec. 6, 1993, article by one of the most viciously anti-American journalists around, Robert Fisk of London's Independent. A puff piece on Osama bin Laden entitled "Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army on the Road to Peace," it includes the following passage:

But what of the Arab mujahedin whom he took to Afghanistan--members of a guerrilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States--and who were forgotten when that war was over? "Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help. . . ."

Mixed Signals From NPR
A few weeks back, we noted a Chicago Tribune story in which Loren Jenkins, senior foreign editor of National Public Radio, said he would report on American troop movements. The passage bears repeating:

"The game of reporting is to smoke 'em out," he says. Asked whether his team would report the presence of an American commando unit it found in, say, a northern Pakistan village, he doesn't exhibit any of the hesitation of some of his news-business colleagues, who stress that they try to factor security issues into their coverage decisions.

"You report it," Jenkins says. "I don't represent the government. I represent history, information, what happened."

Now, NPR's president, Bruce Drake, has issued a statement on the ensuing controversy:

Over the past several weeks, a number of journalists have reprised a newspaper story suggesting that NPR and its foreign editor, Loren Jenkins, sees it as our business to reveal secret whereabouts of U.S. covert forces in Afghanistan. Loren Jenkins neither believes nor intended to suggest that NPR would engage in reporting that would put in peril the lives of U.S. military personnel. NPR reporters, producers and editors always take into account whether our reporting might put lives in danger, or pose an unacceptable security risk. NPR would never knowingly compromise the security or safety of American military or national security operations by reporting information that would endanger them. The entire editorial team at NPR operates by this standard, and our reporting on the terrorism story and its aftermath reflects our careful editorial practices in this regard.

Drake doesn't deny that Jenkins said what the Tribune quoted him as saying, and the Media Research Center reports that the Tribune's Steve Johnson stands by his story. It's hard to square Drake's statement with Jenkins's quotes, and thus Drake seems to be obfuscating rather than clarifying. How about a forthright statement from Jenkins himself, explaining what he meant and what he now thinks? He could lay this whole controversy to rest with three little words: I was wrong.

Is Foreign Coverage More Accurate?
New York Times TV critic Caryn James (link requires registration) argues that BBC viewers are getting a more realistic picture of the war than viewers of American TV networks:

After taking a Taliban-guided tour into southern Afghanistan last week, along with other Western journalists, Simon Ingram wrapped up his four-day experience for "BBC World News." The cameras showed a crowd of village men in turbans, their fists raised in anger as soldiers looked on.

"Within the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, evidence of the challenge Washington is facing," Mr. Ingram said. He described the men chanting their allegiance to the Taliban and death to America and added, "No sign here that the intensifying American bombardment is achieving its goal."

ABC's Dan Harris, who was also on the tour, summed up his experience for "Good Morning America." He, too, said the villagers were angry at America but emphasized how friendly they were to him. "It's not that they're not bitter about the almost daily U.S. bombings," Mr. Harris said, in a warm and fuzzy tone. "They simply don't blame individual Americans."

For another example of foreign and domestic news organizations putting a different spin on the same story, compare Agence France-Presse's report from Quetta, Pakistan, on Afghan refugees' hatred of the Taliban (which we noted yesterday) with the Washington Post's report, which takes the view that the bombing only makes the Taliban stronger.

Our Friends the United Way
CNSNews.com reports that the September 11th Fund--affiliated with the United Way and intended to help the victims of Sept. 11--has donated $177,000 to the Legal Aid Society, which is "aiding in the legal defense of eight suspects detained in Brooklyn, N.Y. as a result of the government's investigation into the terrorist attacks."

Sept. 11 and Gay Bashing
Gay journalist Michelangelo Signorile, writing in Newsweek, says he's afraid the Sept. 11 attacks will lead to "gay bashing." Reason? Some have speculated that head hijacker Mohamad Atta, described by his father as "girly," was homosexual. "What, after all, should it matter if Atta were gay? The fear is that such a line of inquiry seeks to establish, willfully or not, that murderous homosexuals--perhaps an entire network of them--are behind the terrorist attacks." Andrew Sullivan made a similar point about Osama bin Laden: "Everyone keeps asking me: do you think he's gay? The answer is surely irrelevant: gay or straight, he has clear issues with women."

Speculation about the sexual orientation of Osama and his men strikes us as awfully fanciful. Signorile cites a National Enquirer piece on Atta; Sullivan's comments seem to be based on pure gossip. And for our part, we haven't heard anyone other than these two gay journalists speculate about the terrorists' orientation. But if there were something to these rumors, surely it would be a relevant part of the psychological profile of the perpetrators, though of course it would not justify any gay-bashing.

If gay leaders want to prevent bashing, they might consider toning down their campaign against the military's don't-ask-don't-tell policy for the duration of the war. Law professor Marci Hamilton notes that the Society for American Law Teachers has--even since Sept. 11--been waging a campaign to make it difficult for the military to recruit on law-school campuses. Whatever one may think of the military's policy toward homosexuality, this is not the time to be waging such a battle.

Stupidity Watch
Alina Lebedyeva, a Latvian schoolgirl of Russian descent, "slapped the Prince of Wales across the left cheek with a red carnation yesterday in an anti-war protest in Riga." Lebedyeva, a member of the National Bolshevik Movement, apparently hasn't heard that the Cold War is over and the Russians are on our side in this war.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
Amanda Williams, an eighth-grader at Five Forks Middle School in Lawrenceville, Ga., is serving a nine-day suspension for drinking . . . grape juice! She got the juice at the school cafeteria and then joked that she was drinking wine. The Atlanta Journal-Consitition reports she was suspended under a county policy that prohibits a student from possessing drugs, alcohol or "any substance under the pretense that it is in fact a prohibited substance." Makes us wonder what the administrators at Five Forks have been drinking.

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Damian Bennett, Jim Orheim, Jim Bruni, James Mulvihill, Ronald Ramsay, Joseph Grady, C.E. Dobkin, Brit Hume, Chuck Herrick, Richard Miniter, Glenn Reynolds, Cheryl Post, Chris Fenwick, Brian Dawson and Art Moore. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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