From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Did
Someone Say Something About a Quagmire?
Gee, it seems like only yesterday President Bush was urging the Northern Alliance
not to take Kabul, should it somehow find the opportunity. Actually, it was
Saturday (time flies when you're having fun). Yesterday the Taliban fled the
Afghan capital, and this morning the Northern Alliance sauntered in.
"The quick collapse of Kabul has become a recurring theme in Afghanistan's long, strange war," notes an Associated Press dispatch from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. "Time and again, the rival factions have waged fierce battles for years in remote mountains and isolated villages--only to see the capital change hands with barely a shot fired."
An AP dispatch from Kabul reports that the Northern Alliance's Foreign Minister Abdullah--like Madonna, he goes by only one name--said that "the situation in the southern city of Kandahar--the headquarters of the Taliban movement--was 'chaotic' and that there was a popular uprising against Taliban rule in the eastern city of Jalalabad." Abdullah also says the alliance "has invited all the country's factions--except the Taliban--to come to newly captured Kabul to negotiate a post-Taliban government."
Writing in National Review Online, retired Air Force colonel Charles Miller ponders what comes next:
Taliban forces are reported to be streaming (running away) West and South toward their "stronghold" of Kandahar. This does not mean that they have disintegrated as a military force and that the war is over, although that is certainly a leading candidate for what is coming soon. Other war developments could include the Taliban regrouping in their "stronghold" areas around Kandahar and hanging on as best they can (more footage of air strikes); the Taliban adopting guerilla tactics and fighting on in their region; or the Taliban fighting door to door in one last burst of urban warfare before departing this world for parts unknown.
Boo
Hoo
The Kabul office of Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based news station that's been giving
gobs of airtime to Osama bin Laden, has been destroyed by a U.S. missile. None
of its staff were hurt.
Russia's
Walking Nukes?
The Washington Post reports that "a senior Russian official has reported
a major incident involving the attempted theft of nuclear materials in the past
two years." The official, Yuri Volodin, gives no information about the
supposed lapse in security, except to say it was of the "highest possible
consequence."
Whew
Yesterday's horrific plane crash in the Rockaway section of Queens appears to
have been an accident. In the post-Sept. 11 world, that's good news.
At least 262 were killed in the crash; five local residents are missing.
In a sad twist, a man and a woman who were headed for the Dominican Republic on the doomed plane had close calls Sept. 11. Felix Sanchez left his job as a World Trade Center-based broker for Merrill Lynch on Sept. 10; yesterday he was on his way to meet with clients in his new job as a financial adviser to Dominican baseball players. And Hilda Yolanda Mayor had worked in a ground-floor restaurant in the trade center.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that a 70-year-old New York man, his flight diverted to Philadelphia because of the crash, waved $100 in front of a cabbie in the City of Brotherly Love. The driver zoomed to Philadelphia's 30th Street Station "in a flat 14 minutes." The man caught the 12:43 Metroliner and was in New York by 2:15. Why the rush? The old man, Dan Rather, is an anchor for CBS News. He delivered his first report on the crash at 3:55.
Mandela
to Bush: Stay the Course
Appearing at the White House with President Bush yesterday, Nelson Mandela,
South Africa's first democratically elected president, offered strong support
for America's war effort:
One of the reasons for coming here is to be able to express my support for the president for his action in Afghanistan. The United States of America lost 5,000 people, innocent people, and it is quite correct for the president to ensure that the terrorists, those masterminds, as well as those who have executed the action and survived, are to be punished heavily.
And it would be disastrous if the president gave in to the call that the army must now withdraw, before he has actually flushed out the terrorists. That would be disaster. They will claim that they have defeated the United States of America, and they will continue doing the same thing. So I support him to continue until those terrorists have been tracked down.
Our
Friends at the State Department
The New York Times (link requires registration) reports on a new book, "Ben
Laden: La Vérité Interdite," published in France. A co-author,
Jean-Charles Brisard, says he met in July with John O'Neill, who was director
of antiterrorism at the FBI's New York office until he resigned in August to
become security chief for the World Trade Center, where he died on Sept. 11.
The Times reports:
Mr. O'Neill's frustrations with the State Department were not secret. He had been leading the F.B.I.'s investigation into the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen in October 2000, but he had been barred in July from returning to Yemen by the United States ambassador there.
The ambassador, Barbara Bodine, complained that Mr. O'Neill and his associates showed no sensitivity to Yemeni culture or concerns and were harming relations between the two countries.
No
Comment
Advertising Age reports the National Security Agency has hired the Baltimore-based
ad firm of Trahan, Burden & Charles to run a campaign aimed at discouraging
Americans from disclosing sensitive information. "The effort warns that
free exchange of information, such as publishing floor plans of New York buildings,
could jeopardize national security," Ad Age reports. "One ad features
a 'keep it zipped' theme, referring to disk drives in a modern twist on an old
theme."
Asked to comment, an NSA spokesman says: "We have no information to provide."
Latinos
and Arabs
Columnist Yvette Cabrera reports in the Orange County Register that California
Latinos have been more hostile to Arab-Americans in the wake of Sept. 11 than
has anyone else. Naturally, she floats the theory that this is because Latinos
are the victims of oppression:
Psychotherapist Mayra Prado believes the root of the problem is precisely our historical experiences. . . . If anybody has been at the receiving end of hatred, it has been Latinos, Prado says.
People who tend to be on the receiving end of ostracism, it's almost like when the next group is identified, it's a relief," Prado says. "It's, 'Now I'm part of the American mainstream; now I'm part of the group that's hating that other group.' Of course this creates more hatred and more chaos in the world. It doesn't help."
A more positive view of Latinos, though, comes from Gregory Rodriguez, who writes in the Washington Post:
In many ways, it is the newest Angelenos who seem to be taking the tragic events most personally. While the millions of Anglos who moved here in the post-war years from the East came to escape America--to the place that novelist Frank Fenton called "a city of refugees from America"--the more recent newcomers, largely from the South and West [Latin America and Asia], are running toward it. And many are feeling more fully American now than ever before. Two Spanish-language radio stations sponsored the single largest solidarity rally here. A European-born Vietnamese immigrant I know who has long refused to become a U.S. citizen now uses the pronoun "we" when talking about Americans. And there are more flags hanging from houses in the working-class barrios of the Eastside than there are in tony Brentwood. Nobody is talking about the ethnic balkanization of L.A. anymore.
No one except maybe Yvette Cabrera and psychotherapist Maria Prado.
Stupidity Watch
A couple of prime examples of stupidity from the academy. Here's Eric
Freedman, a professor of First Amendment law at Hofstra University, in a
letter to the New York Times (link requires registration):
As we have just been forcibly reminded, some people believe that America is a land of murdering barbarians, and that their institutions are of much higher moral quality than ours. The job of journalists is to ensure that the public has access to all of the viewpoints that underlie current events so that, in our role as citizens, we may make sound public policy choices.
And here's As'ad Abu Khalil, a professor at California State University, Stanislaus: "You either have to be with bin Laden or with the U.S. Where do I stand because I'm against both? We all should be against both."
Counterpunch.com publishes a wacko screed by one Douglas Valentine, which concludes as follows:
This ability to commit the most horrific acts of terror, and successfully blame them on its enemies through black propaganda, is what makes the CIA's inclusion in the OHS [Office of Homeland Security] so dangerous. This one-two punch, in conjunction with the CIA's expertise at "provoked responses" and "false flag recruitments," also makes the CIA itself a prime suspect in the terror attacks of 11 September, and the current propaganda campaign being waged in America now, as a pretext to threaten terror against the Bush Administration's domestic political opponents, as well as to win support from the terrified middle class for the illegitimate Bush regime.
Hey Doug, if the CIA is both powerful and ruthless enough to pull off such huge acts of terror, why does it allow guys like you to run around "exposing" the "truth" about its atrocities? If your article weren't a preposterous paranoid fantasy, we'd advise you to watch your back.
In the right margin of this page, Salon lists its personal-ad "pick of the day," one "daria chica." Her ad says: "Homophobes, Christians, Right-Wingers and Military Guys need not apply." Sounds like a lovely gal.
The
Terrorists Win, and the Tip Diminishes
The Onion publishes an important article entitled "If I Don't Get My Medium-Rare
Shell Steak With Roasted Vegetables in the Next Ten Minutes, Then the Terrorists
Have Already Won." The author, "Bernard Kloss," writes in the form of an open
letter to a waitress: "These are hard times for all of us. Some days, I can
barely bring myself to send back my tuna sandwich for having too much mayo or
too little tarragon. Yet to hang my head in defeat and eat a sandwich that fails
to meet my personal specifications is exactly what they want us to do."
This guy is almost as funny as Barnes & Noble's Mary Ellen Keating.
Some
Things Are Best Left Unhung
The ceramic-penis "art" exhibit won't be returning to the public library
in Boulder, Colo. Safehouse, the domestic-violence group that sponsored the
exhibition, says "its concerns were for the security of the exhibit and
its patrons," the Rocky Mountain News reports.
No word yet on whether Bob "El Dildo Bandito" Rowan, who stole the silly sculpture, will face prosecution; police are consulting the sculptress, Susanne Walker, to see if she wants them to press charges. Barry Satlow, head of the Boulder County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union suddenly finds himself taking a tough-on-crime attitude:
Leaving it up to the victim, he said, harks back to the ineffective way in which domestic violence once was handled: "If she doesn't complain, it's OK, it's not a crime?" he said.
"Bull. This is a crime and should be treated as a crime."
Rowan says people have contacted him about setting up a legal-defense fund.
She
Won't Get Her Cat Fixed Either
Lauren Hammond, a member of the Sacramento, Calif., City Council, is fuming
at Robert Pacuinas, a Sacramento lawyer. Pacuinas, speaking at a City Council
hearing, "emphasized his point by saying, 'I think we should call a spade
a spade.' " the Sacramento Bee reports. Hammond exploded: "You--made
an ethnically and racially derogatory remark and I hope you think about what
you said. It is not appreciated. It is no longer a part of modern English. The
phrase just isn't used in good company anymore."
Just one problem: The word spade in this expression is not a racial slur at all. It refers to a shovel. So the problem is Hammond's ignorance, not Pacuinas's insensitivity. Says Pacuinas: "I just can't believe she is sticking to her guns." Uh-oh, he may be hearing from Sarah Brady next.
You
Don't Say
The Associated Press reports on a new study that finds "feminine beauty affects
a man's brain at a very primal level, not on some higher, more intellectual
plane."
(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Jim Orheim, Raghu Desikan, Hazen Dempster, C.E. Dobkin, Richard Miniter, Kevin Deenihan, Joel Engel, Sasha Eysymontt, Gregory Taylor, William Patterson and Joshua Sharf. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: The media re-re-recount vindicates Bush v. Gore (requires registration).
- Collin Levey: Two cheers for torture.
- Tom Bray: The era of big government may still be over.
