The Week - Column

National Review, March 11, 2002

-- To all who love jihad, and the murder of Israelis, the Palestinian suicide bomberess is a heroine, compared, in some quarters, to the Virgin Mary. One wonders: What do Vatican Arabists make of that?

-- The Bush administration has chosen to dump the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada, at Yucca Mountain. Explains energy secretary Spencer Abraham: "Yucca Mountain will bring together the location, natural barriers, and design elements necessary to protect the health and safety of the public." But what about Vermont? It brings together Jim Jeffords, Pat Leahy, and Bernie Sanders.

-- You read it in the Washington Post: "The Afghan war, so easy to understand in its early, black and white days . . ." Flag on that play! What has gone gray, exactly? Well, there are reports that our bombs and choppers missed their targets, or hit the wrong ones, and that many Afghan civilians have died as a result. And there are also reports that Afghan prisoners were beaten by their American captors. Rewind the tape back to the first three words of the Post's sentence: "The Afghan war . . ." Innocent civilians have indeed been killed in this war; so have American and other friendly troops, by American fire. This is the ancient and inescapable effect of flinging masses of explosives on mobile and imperfectly identified targets. Mullah Omar should have thought of these consequences before he allowed his country to become an al-Qaeda truck stop. As for the beating story, the Pentagon is investigating. If any untoward discipline was inflicted, you can be sure that the soldiers responsible will be punished, far more stringently than any Afghans, friends or enemies, have ever punished their own for rights violations.

-- John Walker Lindh, a.k.a. Abdul Hamid, a.k.a. Sulayman al-Faris, has suddenly developed a fondness for Western culture -- well, at least for Miranda rights. His lawyers plan to argue that their client was coerced into giving two statements to the FBI in which he apparently admitted that he trained in an al-Qaeda camp and knowingly chose to fight alongside the Taliban against American forces. As Lindh challenges the admission of the statements, his credibility will be up against that of the FBI agent who took the statements, whose account might well be bolstered by other witnesses. There is no question that Lindh had previously freely admitted his enthusiasm for bin Laden's cause. A TV camera crew captured that admission in Technicolor, and Lindh sent e- mails to his parents affirming his hostility to America. All, of course, before he converted to the Western way of lawyering.

-- A campaign-finance sidelight: John McCain has recently mentioned the Club for Growth as the kind of organization whose nefarious activities his bill is necessary to police. The senator told CNN, "What we're trying to do is stop organizations like a so-called Club for Growth that came into Arizona in a primary, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in attack ads. We had no idea who they were, where their money came from. And that's what we're trying to prevent here." Actually, the club's donors (at least those who donate over $200) are on file with the FEC, as required by law. Stephen Moore, the president of the club (and an NR contributing editor), says it ran no negative ads in Arizona -- it ran only positive ads about congressional candidate Jeff Flake, who went on to win his primary over the candidate of McCain's choice. Perhaps that's why the senator is still upset -- and wants to ban all such activity in the future.

-- Al Gore gave his first post-2000 foreign-policy address at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, riffing off President Bush's anatomy of the "axis of evil." It is true that Gore wanted to extend the definition of "evil" phenomena in ways more congenial to himself: He called global warming "a threat to international peace and stability," and HIV/AIDS "a national security threat." But what else would a liberal Democrat say? Gore also gave Bush "tremendous credit" for his counter-attack on terror; he acknowledged that Iraq and Iran were dangerous enemies ("a final reckoning with [Iraq] should be on the table"). When he attacked "corrupt and tyrannical governments" in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, anyone?), and poverty as an "aquifer of anger," who can say that he is wrong, even if his remedies, or his analysis of causes, is faulty? We remain glad that Gore did not in fact win the election of 2000; but, grading his speech on a curve, and throwing in half a point in the spirit of national unity, we would give him a B.

-- The good news is that the Bush administration still opposes the Kyoto Protocol. The bad news is that it bowed to environmentalist pressure to "do something" on global climate change, despite the utter failure of scientific research to validate the overheated worries of environmentalists. While voluntary, the plan increases the political momentum for costly and ill-considered climate controls. The proposal clutters the tax code with additional credits for politically correct technologies and increases funding for international environmental bureaucrats. It also hints at tighter auto fuel-economy standards, which make cars more expensive and less safe. Worse, the plan sows the seed for mandatory emission limits by promising to give companies credit for voluntary emission reductions. As these credits accumulate, so will support for emission controls as companies seek to turn paper credits into tangible assets. The administration may have put itself on a green slippery slope.