The Week

-- Australians and Americans fought together in all of the 20th cecentury's wars-not just the popular crusades of the world wars (in each of which Australia fought longer than we did), but in the grim Cold War struggles of Korea and Vietnam. Australians fought with us in Afghanistan. Now, in the Bali disco bombings, al-Qaeda has struck Australian men and women in the way it prefers-without provocation, by stealth, murderously. Our hearts go out to a great and grieving nation.

-- No one knows how many innocent people the bombing killed, since so mamany bodies were burned. Approximately 100 young Australians died, as did at least seven Americans. The operation was an elegant Islamofascist strike-it killed Western revelers on a Hindu island; and by hurting the tourist industry, it will drive Indonesia's faltering economy yet further down, thus boosting the prospects of fanatical Islamist groups. Abu Bakar Bashir, the leader of one such group, Jemaah Islamiyah, blamed the bombing on Jews and Americans, praised Osama bin Laden, threatened Australia, and advised the families of the victims to convert to the religion of peace. Indonesia has denied American warnings that it harbored Islamists, though Muslim mobs have been killing native Christians there for years. The culture of Southeast Asia encourages conflict avoidance, until pent-up wrath breaks out in slaughter (running "amok" is a Malay term). So far, the Indonesian government has supplied the denial, and the Islamists the slaughter.

-- Can the Democrats be trusted with the country's defense? The cocongressional vote on Iraq provides mixed evidence. A majority of House Democrats voted against letting President Bush deal with the Iraqi threat. But all of the party's presidential hopefuls-Daschle, Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, and Lieberman-voted with the president, as did all but one of its senators who are up for re-election this year. The exception was Paul Wellstone, who voted his peacenik convictions. Some of the hawks were voting their convictions, too; others, their ambitions. Lieberman is probably the only Democrat who, if he were president, might have chosen the same course as President Bush. The rest of the Democrats have proven that they are willing to authorize military action once a Republican president and the electorate force their hand. The Scoop Jackson wing of the party is still dead.

-- Been called "Talibanic" lately? If so, you must be a coconservative Republican. That's the new trick: We are "Talibanic," or members of the "Taliban wing" of the Republican party. It's kind of an old trick, too. Back in the early 1980s, when Sam Donaldson discovered Hezbollah (as it was hijacking, kidnapping, murdering, and committing other mayhem), he delighted in referring to "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican party"- that meant all those GOP-ers who supported Reagan. Now the Taliban's "in." When Democrats say "Taliban wing," they smile like they're the first to have thought of it. But we have to ask: Who was it who fought, ruined, and banished the Taliban? Bunch of "Taliban Republicans," really, starting with the President of the United States.

-- Logic tells the mind that the risk of being shot by the Beltway snsniper cannot be significantly greater than the risks of everyday activities-e.g., driving a car. But cars do not intend to crash themselves; the deaths and injuries on the road are accidental. The malignancy of the sniper makes him terrifying. His tarot cards and his request for money (if genuine) make it unlikely that he is a terrorist. But terrorists, or their copycats, may learn from him. Al-Qaeda and its patrons are surely sending other plans of murder our way. Americans must learn the virtues of daily stoicism-the right mixture of prudence and unconcern. We will do our best to hunt our enemies down. They are scum. The rest is in God's hands.

-- The sniper has called forth a Pavlovian response from liberals, who ththink his crimes illustrate the need for-of course-gun control. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wants to ride the issue to victory in the Maryland gubernatorial race. Never mind the failure of the state's current Democratic administration to enforce existing gun laws. The cause du jour is "ballistic fingerprinting." Create a registry of fingerprints, and supposedly the police would be able to track a bullet to the gunowner who fired it. There are serious questions about the reliability of ballistic fingerprinting, but leave those aside (or see John R. Lott Jr.'s "Bullets and Bunkum," page 28). Registering new guns would still do nothing to deal with the over 200 million guns already in circulation in America. If liberals were willing to advocate the prohibition of long-range rifles, including the confiscation of those already owned, it would be possible for them to argue that their favored policies would stop the sniper in his tracks. We would still disagree with them. But at least their position would deserve respect, as it now does not.

-- A little more than a year after the September 11 attacks, Osama bin LaLaden is on the run or possibly dead, the financial base of al-Qaeda has been ruptured, and Afghanistan's Taliban government is no more. And yet, according to CIA director George Tenet, "the threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer"-i.e., before the most fatal terrorist strikes in history. At least that's what Tenet told a congressional panel on October 17. This vague warning has the look of a self-administered inoculation: If something awful does happen in the near term, nobody can say Tenet didn't give us a heads-up. The warning must also be interpreted as a startling admission of failure. Tenet, a Clinton holdover, has directed central intelligence for five years; he says he declared "war" on bin Laden four years ago; and now he has had more than a year of almost limitless resources to protect Americans from a specific enemy. He insists that we are still no better off. It makes one wonder if we'd be better off without Tenet.

-- John Thune, running for the Senate in South Dakota, ran an ad making ththe point that incumbent Democrat Tim Johnson is weak on missile defense. Saddam Hussein's picture flashes on the screen as an example of the kind of menace against whom Johnson would leave America defenseless. Johnson calls the ad "despicable," charging that it links him to the dictator and questions his patriotism. It does neither. The announcer in the ad says, "Is this a question of patriotism? No. It's a question of judgment." What Johnson is attempting here is to take military issues off the table. Patriotism, it seems, has become the first refuge of anti-defense Democrats. Thune should double his ad buy.

-- Also in South Dakota, the FBI and the state attorney general's ofoffice have opened an investigation on several Indian reservations where the Democratic party appears to have registered an unusual number of dead or non-existent people. The Democrats already have fired one of their get-out-the-vote coordinators, Becky Red-Earth Villeda, for her role in the deception. There's something refreshing about a voter-fraud probe occurring before an election. It would be even more refreshing if this one resulted in some actual prosecutions. If South Dakota doesn't work out, there's always neighboring Minnesota. The website for the Democratic Socialists of America recently advertised a "national election project" to "bring young people to Minnesota," which has same- day registration and where Democratic senator Paul Wellstone "will need a high percentage of young people to register and vote for him." Ever since the narrow election in Florida two years ago, many Democrats have pushed for reforms at the federal level. A more efficacious way to improve the electoral system would be for them to reform their own party.

-- Georgia Right to Life has rescinded its endorsement of Republican SeSenate candidate Saxby Chambliss because Chambliss believes that abortion should be legal when pregnancies result from rape or incest. The organization's position is more logically consistent with pro-life principles than that of Chambliss. But pro-lifers are morally obligated to uphold their principles in ways that actually advance them, and determining what those ways are requires political judgment based on the circumstances of the day. Rape and incest account for less than 2 percent of all abortions, and we are dauntingly far away from a ban on the other 98 percent. A ban on abortion in cases of rape and incest isn't on the table or close to it. (Neither, for that matter, are bans on abortifacient contraceptives and in vitro fertilization as it is currently practiced, two other things that a consistent pro-lifer would support.) Chambliss's opponent will not countenance a ban even on partial-birth abortion. If the abolitionists had followed the Georgia example, they would have withheld support from candidates who, though opposing slavery, refused to extend full civil rights to blacks. Georgia Right to Life's imprudence sets back its goal. Pro-lifers face enough difficulties without adding to them.

-- Medical marijuana has crossed the radar screen of billionaire and InIndependence party candidate for governor of New York Tom Golisano, who has devoted some of the tens of millions of dollars he is spending on his race to TV ads promoting the idea. Opportunism? Sure. But in our system political players are supposed to be driven by felt needs, and nowhere is the need for drug-law reform greater than in New York, which still labors under the rigid and onerous penalties for drug-related offenses imposed 30 years ago by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. Giving doctors and patients the freedom to use marijuana to alleviate the symptoms and side-effects of grueling treatment would be a small but salutary change.

-- When President Bush addressed the United Nations on Iraq, throwing ththe record of Iraqi violations of its resolutions in its face, it seemed like dialectical jujitsu. But the weeks since have been more like sumo wrestling, as the massive unwillingness of the U.N. to act has caused us to yield point after point. The latest giveaway was announced by Colin Powell, who made it sound as though regime change were no longer our goal, and that human rights, threats to Iraq's neighbors, and attacks on American and British aircraft counted for nothing: "The major issue before us is disarmament." Now we are hoping to get the Security Council to agree to a watered-down resolution threatening "serious consequences" if Iraq fails to cooperate with inspectors. But France wants a two-step process, with another Security Council meeting to follow an Iraqi failure. The reason inspectors have anything to inspect, however, is that Iraq has already failed to disarm itself, as it promised after the Gulf War. France and Russia wish to block action in order to frustrate America, and to preserve economic deals with Iraq. Meanwhile we surrender our security in an effort to please the unpleasable, who wish to defend the indefensible.

-- In a move that joined the desperation of a wanted man with the cacaprice of ancient Rome, Saddam Hussein emptied Iraq's prisons of common criminals and some political prisoners, and announced a general amnesty. Of course there were exceptions, "Zionist and American spies" among them. But tens of thousands of Iraqis were released. Saddam aims to show the world, and his own people, what a great guy he is. But as jubilant prisoners rushed to stunned relatives, both equally unable to believe their good fortune, an odd portent showed itself in the carnival atmosphere: One guard gave a thumbs-up to an American photographer and said, "Bush! Bush!" Crude personal diplomacy-or a sign of what may happen if the lid truly comes off?

-- It is little remembered now, but Iraq was a place d'armes in both woworld wars, with the British pushing north up the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates to secure the Mesopotamian oilfields from control by the Turks (1914-18), or from seizure by the Germans (1939-45). As a result, there are 54,000 British and Commonwealth military dead buried at 13 cemeteries scattered across Iraq. These cemeteries are now being systematically desecrated by the Iraqi authorities. At one such place on the outskirts of Basra, 60-odd stone plaques inscribed with the names of the dead have been pulled down and smashed. At North Gate cemetery in Baghdad, where thousands of British and Indian troops lie at rest, graffiti cover the mausoleum of Gen. Sir Stanley Maude, who died of cholera shortly after routing the Turks and capturing the city in 1917. Knowing what chance their armies will stand at the hands of living allied troops, it seems that the Iraqis have decided to take what satisfaction they can from insulting the dead.

-- The news from Pakistan continues to be distressing. In the recent elelections, Islamist parties made big gains. President Musharraf has suppressed moderate secular parties that could be a counterweight to the fundamentalists, in order to consolidate his military rule. Furthermore, Musharraf may be quietly backing off his cooperation with the U.S.-even as he is overwhelmingly identified as a U.S.-sponsored dictator. So, it's just possible that we will get the worst of all worlds in Pakistan. Someone should remind Musharraf that if he's not truly "our SOB," well then . . . he's just an SOB.

-- In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which the ClClinton administration threw its weight behind, is in a state of suspension. A police raid on the offices of Sinn Fein revealed that the party's inclusion in the power-sharing executive set up under the agreement had proved an irresistible temptation to gather secret information-including transcripts of taped conversations between Tony Blair and George W. Bush. (Sinn Fein's code name for Blair turned out to be: Naive Idiot.) The secret information was probably passed on to the armed terrorist gangs for whom Sinn Fein acts as a respectable front. Palestine, Korea, Ireland: The common denominator in all these "peace-making" efforts was a belief that dictators and terrorists could be trusted to keep their word-could, in fact, be civilized by being drawn into the normal process of democracy and rational diplomacy. That belief has now been proved to be as incontrovertibly false as the phlogiston theory of combustion.

-- If the Nobel Peace Prize is getting you down, you can always think ofof the Civil Courage Prize. This is the award established in New York by John Train, who was inspired by the example of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The great man, in fact, serves on the foundation's board. The prize is meant to honor "steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk." This year, it went to a Cuban dissident, Vladimiro Roca Antunez. An honorable mention went to another Cuban dissident, Gustavo Arcos Bergnes. Further on the Cuban front, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet-yet another great Cuban-was, at the time of writing, set to be released from one of Castro's dungeons on October 31. His wife expressed her thanks to supporters in the United States, saying, "This has been a very tough period in our lives, but human solidarity has brought enormous spiritual compensation." Meanwhile, many other prisoners, such as the blind lawyer and "independent librarian" Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, still endure their tortures. And Barbara Walters recently had a nice chat with Fidel Castro, continuing the flirtation she began in the '70s. Human-rights and democracy activists wailed in pain and outrage. But then, they should be used to it.

-- In a referendum on October 19, the people of Ireland voted Yes to ththe Treaty of Nice, which provides for the entry of ten new countries-mainly from Central and Eastern Europe-into the EU, and for a unified European military. The Irish had shaken up the Eurocrats a year before by voting No on the same treaty. The issues for the Irish were: their cherished neutrality in military matters, fear of mass immigration from poorer countries, loss of influence in a larger union, and the gradually-emerging picture of the "restructured" EU as an Anglo-Franco-Italo-German consortium in which smaller countries count for very little. In between last year's No and this year's Yes, a concession had been made on military matters. Ireland's fiercely pro-EU establishment, determined not to be embarrassed again, had spent vast sums of money on the Yes campaign-outspending the Noes around ten to one. For all that, only 30 percent of voters said Yes, 18 percent said No, and 52 percent stayed home. These figures, coming from a nation that has perhaps benefited from EU membership more than any other, say something striking about the appeal of the European project in its current incarnation. Is this lack of enthusiasm shared in other EU nations? We do not know: Only Ireland, because of a quirk in her constitution, was obliged to hold a referendum.

-- Democracy is a core value for the nations of the EU, right? And ththere are few more brazen enemies of democracy than Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, right? It is therefore not surprising that the EU has banned Mugabe and his cronies from traveling to its member nations. Excellent- a blow for democratic principles. But wait: Here is an organization called the Southern African Development Community, a sort of black EU embracing 14 southern African nations. Zimbabwe is a member. The EU wants to hold a meeting with the SADC, to discuss food aid and joint projects. The meeting was to take place in Denmark, an EU member nation. Zimbabwe wanted to attend. Uh-oh. But this kind of thing is no problem for those worldly, pragmatic Europeans: The EU merely moved the meeting to Mozambique, so that Mugabe's man could take part. Thank goodness those simplistic, moralizing Americans weren't involved!

-- Last issue, we reported on the international racism conference held inin Barbados-intended as a follow-up to the U.N. Durban conference- where attendees voted to expel non-blacks from the proceedings (it was too painful to discuss the slave trade in front of the children of the oppressors). Now the organizers have come running back to master, begging white businessmen to pay off the conference's debt of $100,000. Well, not begging, exactly: "If [whites] don't see fit to contribute, then I would be asking black people to think very carefully about how they would spend their money," thundered the president of the Congress Against Racism. And so the conference had a fitting end.

-- In 1960 Harold Macmillan, then prime minister of Britain, made his fafamous and happily "progressive" Winds of Change speech, welcoming de-colonization, which has turned out to have extraordinarily mixed results. Last August, the island republic of Jamaica celebrated the 40th anniversary of its independence from Britain. A Jamaican newspaper conducted a poll that now has become a subject of outrage and indignation. Omigod, 53 percent replied that the country would have been better off had it remained a British colony, while only 15 percent thought it would have been worse off. Meanwhile in Zimbabwe . . .

-- In the preface to his mighty Dictionary, Samuel Johnson scoffed at ththose who thought that such a work ought to fix the language once and for all: "To enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength." Johnson's preface is apparently not much studied in Romania, where the language of everyday life has been taking in loan-words from English at a fair clip these past few years: "hot dog," "laptop," "show business," and, inevitably, "cool." Parliamentarians in Bucharest have now passed a law insisting that any foreign words spoken at a public event be accompanied by a Romanian translation. The humble hot dog must now be referred to, at least in public, by a Romanian phrase meaning: "a kind of sausage in a kind of roll." The French, of course, have been fighting this battle for decades, with little success. It seems to be an obsession with nations whose language is derived from (or, in the case of Romania, more probably just influenced by) Latin-a last rearguard action against the barbarian invasions of the 5th century, perhaps. In Romania's case, we can look on this nonsense with smiling indulgence. Just 13 years ago the Romanians were groaning under the heel of the odious Ceausescu dictatorship. Now at least they have a real parliament, free to debate frivolities like this.

-- Nobody does bad taste like the Germans-which language was it that gagave us "kitsch," after all? German bad taste met German anti- Americanism in October at the Hamburg apartment where Mohamed Atta and his colleagues planned the September 11 attacks. A group of avant-garde German artists put on an exhibition of paintings, videos, and writing at the apartment at Marienstrasse 54, in a district where tensions between Muslim immigrants and longtime German residents run high. Noting the inappropriateness of the whole thing, a local politician ventured the opinion that the artists were merely trying to get some publicity for themselves. Oh, surely not!

-- By the time she was crowned Miss America in September, Erika Harold hahad taken her pro-abstinence message to some 14,000 teens as a spokesman for Project Reality. When she won, however, contest officials-uncomfortable with Harold's social conservatism (she's also pro-life)-tried to pressure her into adopting a less controversial campaign: against teen violence and bullying. But Harold refused to be, well, bullied. "If I don't speak about it now as Miss America," she explained, "I will be disappointing the thousands of young people . . . who need assurance that waiting until marriage for sex is the right thing to do." There was a brief standoff, and the organizers caved. Miss Harold is to be commended for her integrity, of course, but we can't help feeling saddened by her experience. In 1998, contest officials didn't worry that taxpayer-subsidized condoms-the cause of that year's Miss America-would stir up controversy. You can say anything to teens about sex today, it would seem, unless it's that they shouldn't be having it.

-- The Vatican told the American Catholic bishops to rework their =93zero-tolerance" policy for priestly sexual abuse, proposing a commission of four American bishops and four Vatican officials to study the matter. The Vatican called abuse of minors "particularly abhorrent," but appeared to be worried that the American approach considered priests guilty by accusation. They are right to be worried. For years the American bishops acted as though all priests were worth protecting; now they would throw all to the wolves. What American Catholics need from their bishops is leadership. The best service the Vatican can do at this stage would be to discipline those bishops who have most conspicuously failed their flocks.

-- Bill Clinton used black people all through his presidency. This was esespecially true when he was in hot water. As Roger Wilkins said during the Lewinsky scandal, "He knows that if he goes to see black people, he's going to get a warm bath." When Toni Morrison came along and declared Clinton "our first black president," it must have been his finest moment. He has always counted on his black support to validate him as a human being; this support has always been central to his self- esteem. He may be an adulterer, a charlatan, and a liar, but, by golly, black citizens-the holiest Americans-love him, and therefore he must be okay. The folks who run the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame recently inducted him: as its first white member. This, then-as he must see it- is his finest moment. But he's still a louse.

-- The president in the previous administration may have been black, bubut, for some, the real blacks in the current administration aren't nearly black enough. Harry Belafonte kicked up a ruckus when he tarred Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as "house slaves" serving the "master," President Bush. In black America, there's pretty much nothing worse you can call someone than a "house slave"-it is beyond Tom. Powell and Rice responded with extreme, and customary, grace. Powell said, "I'm serving my nation, I'm serving this president: my president, our president." Condi Rice said, "If Harry Belafonte disagrees with my political views, that's fine. That's a conversation that is worth having. We're Americans. . . . But I don't need Harry Belafonte to tell me what it means to be black." No, indeed. Funny that Harry Belafonte should be calling other people minstrels. He was not a minstrel, though-just a singer, doing his job. But he has now shown himself to be a racial poisoner. And a real horse's ass.

-- On 60 Minutes, Jerry Falwell delivered himself of the opinion that ththe Prophet Mohammad was a man of violence. Asked whether he thought Mohammad was a "terrorist," Falwell answered yes. This quickly led to a Muslim riot in India, resulting in the death of nine people. Then, the Iranian government issued a fatwa against Falwell. Said an Islamic- affairs representative of that country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, "The death of that man is a religious duty." Falwell later issued an apology, but it probably won't help-the contract is out. But what an odd way of objecting to the assertion that Islam is violent: to go out and kill.

-- In a ruling this June, the Supreme Court upheld the right of public scschools to conduct random drug tests not only for sports teams, but also for non-athletic extracurricular groups such as chess clubs. Now, according to the Associated Press, some districts are charting newer territory by administering urine tests to catch students who smoke cigarettes. "Tobacco is illegal for them to have-it's also a health and safety issue," one administrator explains. "We've got a responsibility to let the kids know the dangers of tobacco use." If only they had a responsibility to let the kids know the dangers of illiteracy.

-- VH1 is blazing new paths in grotesqueness with its show Music Behind BaBars, each episode of which focuses on a prison band. The billing for the show is at least honest in its thugophilia: "Murderers. Rapists. Thieves. Guitarists. Drummers. For many prison inmates, making music is the only taste of freedom they'll ever get." Last we checked, limiting freedom was sort of the point of imprisonment. For victims and their families, things could not get much worse than this: that, with a boost from VH1 and the prison administrators who allowed this to go through, murderers and rapists are being made into rock stars. That's VH1, doing its part to glorify the most violent predators in America.

-- Historian Stephen E. Ambrose died, age 66. His first book, on Gen. HeHenry Halleck, Lincoln's chief of staff, caught the eye of Dwight Eisenhower, himself a former staff officer. Ambrose's multi-volume biography of Ike launched him as a major historian. In the Nineties, he reached a huge public with books on Lewis and Clark, the transcontinental railroad, and, most memorably, the soldiers who won the Second World War. Ambrose caught some flak when it turned out that several of the quoted passages in one of these last volumes, though footnoted, had not been placed within quotation marks in the text, as they should have been. The criticism was justified. But it was also fueled, in part, by professional envy of his success, and by academic discomfort with his admiring attitude toward many of his subjects. One hero helped him in the last year of his life. Diagnosed with lung cancer, he continued to write, inspired by the example of Ulysses Grant, who produced his Personal Memoirs during his losing battle with throat cancer. R.I.P.

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