On the Right

National Review, March 10, 2003 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

A Hard Day's Viewing

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 4

The History Channel on television had an hour on the First World War. It focused on the attempt by the British to build parallel tunnels that would permit explosives to be detonated inside the German lines in eastern France. The megaton explosives would all go off at the same moment, the British would charge forward, and then make their way to the Belgian port of Ostend to estop the German submarines that were choking Britain to death. The tunnel project took two years. And when time came to move the troops and artillery pieces forward, the rains began, soldiers dropped into the mud and drowned, and not even 100 men could haul artillery pieces out of the mud ruts in which they were stuck. The British had an army of 249,000 when the war started, and now 5 million were mobilized. The Americans arrived in 1917 with 750,000 troops. Casualties in a single day's fighting reached as many as 50,000. Ten million died by the war's end.

Sixty Minutes, one hour later, featured a German doctor who had come home from spending 14 months in North Korea. He told Mike Wallace that he was devoting his time to trying to give an apathetic public some idea of what life is like in that country. Starvation happens before your very eyes. Hospitals use milk bottles to store such medicines as there are. -- Can't they get out some idea of how miserably they live? Mike Wallace asked. -- No. No they can't. There is zero communication with the outside world. Radios are soldered in to the Pyongyang channel. There is a single sign of life: 1 million preening soldiers. That's the equivalent of 30 million Americans in uniform.

And then television gave a reprise of the awful minutes ending the lives of seven human beings, 39 miles from earth, up in the skies, traveling at 12,500 miles per hour. The brief eulogy by President Bush was replayed. He told us that the victims had a "high and noble purpose" in life, that "mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world" by a "longing to understand." He closed with the ultimately understanding words of the prophet Isaiah, who said that God knew the names of every one of the stars He created, so also of the crew of the shuttle Columbia.

So also of the dead in World War I trenches? And the living dead in North Korea? And the impending dead in Iraq?

The hour on television displayed the screeching need both for an understanding, and for a longing to understand, how the star-maker countenances what we do in war and peace on the earth on which we were given free rein. And what we fail to do. We will make an effort in the Mideast, but none is in prospect in the north Pacific, two areas of the world which the seven astronauts overflew 100 times, serene that they were out of harm's way, a dream they died dreaming.

McCain Levels With NATO

BRUSSELS, FEBRUARY 11

The talk at NATO headquarters, a great sprawl in the outskirts of Brussels, the center of which was once a Belgian hospital, is of the impasse over Turkey. Not exactly an impasse: The United States and its allies will eventually have their way, tendering effective protection to Turkey against Iraqi Scud missiles. But the diplomatic fissure is great, exacerbated by parliamentary moves and countermoves.

What matters substantively is that France and Germany (and Belgium) elected on Monday to reaffirm their month-long opposition to pre- emptive, pre-war help to Turkey. What drew attention was the novel invocation by Turkey of Article IV of the NATO treaty. It is not surprising that no one knew what it says, even as no one remembers what Article IV of the U.S. Constitution says. The mind skips over to NATO Article V, which is the pledge of NATO nations to help one another when attacked. Turkey, which has promised bases to the United States when and if needed in the proceedings against Iraq, had been turned down by NATO in its request for anti-missile missiles, and now invoked Article IV, which calls for "consultations" among NATO allies against a potential threat.

What happened at NATO was a refusal, engineered by France and Germany, immediately to grant the implicit fraternal succor of consultation against potential aggression. The French argued that this would presuppose an act of aggression by Iraq, and to do so would be to compromise ongoing U.N. inspection procedures. And indeed, Iraq has decreed that any arming of Turkey designed to augment the U.S. effort in the area would be deemed an act of war.

Two days before, Secretary Rumsfeld and Sen. John McCain were among the speakers at the Munich Conference on European Security Policy. Mr. Rumsfeld reiterated the reasons given by Messrs. Bush and Powell for proceeding against Iraq. There were no surprises in the Rumsfeld speech, though it was vigorous and persuasive, exhibiting his skills as a confident and resourceful leader. He called shrewd attention to the progressive isolation of the NATO dissenters, up against the growing coalition of world leaders joined in the adamant stand we have taken on Iraq.