The Week - Hillary Clinton's spending of taxpayer money, other news from around the world

National Review, April 22, 2002

-- It was recently reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton is the biggest spender -- of taxpayer money -- of any freshman senator ever. So, she continues to "make history."

-- President Bush signed campaign-finance reform without the traditional signing ceremony. A White House aide told the Washington Post, "The president is not a hypocrite. It would have been completely inconsistent with his position on the bill to have some big South Lawn ceremony with ruffles and flourishes." We think we get it. Ruffles and flourishes are reserved for when the president signs bills that are constitutional.

-- Attorney general John Ashcroft announced that federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui, the 33-year-old Moroccan-Frenchman who was meant to be the twentieth hijacker. (Moussaoui is still among us because he was arrested in August 2001 for visa violations after arousing the suspicions of a Minnesota flight- school instructor.) Ashcroft has been attacked for making the announcement himself, thus showing (in the view of Moussaoui's defense lawyers) an unseemly partiality in the case. Ashcroft deserves criticism, but for a different reason: He lobbied for a trial in federal court, rather than a military tribunal. An outlaw organization slips an agent into this country who plots, with partners, to murder thousands of Americans. Why is a man charged with such an offense treated like a normal homicide, or a jaywalker? If Moussaoui doesn't deserve a military tribunal, who does?

-- Maybe along with the vicious anti-Semitism, lessons on how to be an ally should be offered at schools in Saudi Arabia. Lesson Number One: Allies don't sponsor subversive networks in each other's country. The recent federal raids on possibly terrorist-tainted Islamic charities and organizations in the U.S. all had Saudi money in common. Lesson Number Two: Allies don't subvert each other's strategic goals. Crown Prince Abdullah has spent recent weeks brilliantly opposing the U.S. push to topple Saddam Hussein, undermining Dick Cheney's trip with his empty "peace plan" and working to rehabilitate Iraq at the Beirut Arab League summit. The U.S. often worries about an unfriendly regime seizing power in Riyadh. One already has.

-- For months, the government and the media have assumed that the lethal anthrax letters following the September 11 attacks were the work of a homegrown malcontent, perhaps a rogue scientist. This was comforting: to those liberals who always prefer to flail Americans rather than foreigners, even in wartime; to all of us, since domestic enemies are easier to understand and suppress than distant ones. But last month, experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies memo'd top government officials with a different scenario. In June 2001 two of the men who would be 9/11 hijackers came to the emergency room of a Florida hospital; one had a lesion on his leg that the examining physician now describes as "consistent with cutaneous anthrax." We know that the hijackers inquired about crop-dusters, in their planning days, and that al-Qaeda was building a germ lab near Kandahar (American forces found that site). An unfinished lab could not have produced the anthrax for last fall's letters. But the lab suggests an interest; the hospital visit suggests some familiarity. Both suggest tutelage, by a power more advanced than a rich religious bandit. Which means our problems, grave enough, may be graver yet.

-- When spring returns to Afghanistan, so will the remnants of Taliban and al-Qaeda, raiding from over the Pakistani border, or from what temporary hidey-holes they have within the country. Whenever they strike, especially if there is a lull elsewhere, we will hear talk of quagmires, or of Beirut at the time of the Marine-barracks bombing. The strategic situation, however, is different. We do not covet the country, nor do we intend to pacify it; we have no life-and-death commitment to any of the post-Taliban players. We are there to deprive al-Qaeda of a stable base for conspiracy and terrorism. This we have done. All the rest -- even though it will cost time and lives -- is maintenance. Meanwhile, the focus of the terror war must move on to sideshows, such as Yemen and the Philippines, and to major targets, military or political -- Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia. When Ulysses Grant led the Army of the Potomac into Virginia to grapple with Robert E. Lee, President Lincoln told him to use a bulldog's grip, and chew and choke as much as possible. That, not policing the Hindu Kush, is our goal for the year.

-- Annals of Clinton: The former president tells Newsweek that his midnight pardon of Marc Rich was "terrible politics," and not "worth the damage to my reputation," though "that doesn't mean the attacks were true." So if the attacks were false -- if, in other words, Rich deserved a pardon -- why not pardon him, come what may? Didn't the boy from Hope learn this when he shook JFK's hand, and saw his courageous profile? Of the world, post-9/11, the former president says that the terror war is important, though "not like World War II at all" -- future generations will fold it into their study of the former president's own foreign-policy achievements. To be cont., and cont., and cont.