Spectator's Journal/Assad's New Pal
McGurn, William
Louis. Scaffolding already hides most of the historic buildings in this quarte r as workmen from all over East Ger-many polish and rebuild for 1987 . West Berlin, meanwhile, has to rely more o n...
...It takes more convincing in : by William McGurn the case of Greece, not only because tourism is one of Greece's largest in-dustries but also because if the Greek s don't know how to spot terrorism nobody does: Last year alone there were more than a dozen attacks here that injured more than 100 people, in-cluding the bombing of a popular bar near a U.S...
...to come up with a definition of terrorism, the idea is vintage Papandreou: absolutely preposterous, designed to obfuscate...
...Now it is only promising to have plans ready, a mere IOU...
...The more cynical might make a con-nection between his studied rapproche-ment and the rapidly declining stand-ard of living that has pinched Greeks under the Papandreou years . Obviously the former Berkeley professor of economics understands the lesson that the E.C...
...spring) Papandreou had been makin g noises that maybe U.S...
...later we marve l at the trading acumen of the Phoeni-cians without reflecting that the heir s to these creators of the alphabet are th e warring Lebanese...
...Certainly he did not need to fear contradiction from Papandreou . In a land justly celebrated for its hospitali-ty since Homer, the Greek prime minister was the perfect host . Not onl y did he publicly accept Assad's distinc-tion, he added his own little sophistries...
...Together this makes Greece th e hardest hit in Europe : both by ter-rorism itself and the aftershock dro p in tourism revenue...
...If people are going to keep learning fro m it, they'll need some explanatory signs...
...Still, it is embarrassing . The most recent manifestation of th e ongoing Hellenic decline was the recen t state visit here by Syrian presiden t Hafez al-Assad, his first to a "Western " nation in eight years...
...What little heritage it had was largely destroyed during the war , so city, state, and federal government s are spending some $63 million on a gala that will consist mostly o f ephemeral theater events and historic "happenings...
...Scaffolding already hides most of the historic buildings in this quarte r as workmen from all over East Ger-many polish and rebuild for 1987 . West Berlin, meanwhile, has to rely more o n imagination...
...There are also uneas y feelings about the security (or lack thereof) at Athens airport, whence tw o jetliners were hijacked after takeoff las t year...
...Doubtless it is the work of education...
...The final reason for concern , though, is that the remaining traces of the Nazi regime are disappearing...
...Birthdays aside, there's another reason the museums should be built...
...Presumably this means that if only we wait it out Greek foreign policy might come to resemble what might be expected from a NATO mem-ber and economic policies will become more tolerant of the nation's wealthy and productive citizenry, e.g., TAS's other European editor, Mr...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL ASSAD'S NEW PAL Athens—Of the scores of traveler s who have felt the tug of the Muse afte r a summer's eve spent gazing at a moonlit Acropolis, not one seems to have derived any significance fro m Greece's most significant monumen t being a ruin...
...Nor did it do much for th e beleaguered Greek tour promoters, try ing desperately to convince tourists that the terrorism thing is much overdone . What it did was bestow a token of Greece's dwindling legitimacy on the most vicious ruler in the Middle East , possibly the world . Prior to the Assad visit (an d especially during the visit of U.S . Secretary of State George Shultz this William McGurn is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/ Europe and a European editor of The American Spectator...
...are about the only sources of badly needed drachmas that have not yet dried up...
...The problem is that the noise h e makes has determined the debate in Greece, which in turn is going to affect the way Greeks think and act for year s to come . This noise includes the brassy welcome accorded Assad, which itself comes in wake of Papandreou's refusal to implement the sanctions against Libya that the E .C...
...Yet when it comes to terrorism , Syria's Alawite president is champ . Not many other tyrants these days could get away with slaughtering more than 20,000 of his citizens, as Assad did i n Hama in 1982, and still find time t o keep up his well-known support for ter-rorist factions around the world...
...strike on Libya was a "terrorist action . " He then called for a United Nations con-ference to define the term...
...his is mostly noise...
...Behind the scenes, these folks say, Papandreou is changing...
...What this has meant is a drop i n 1986 tourism by as much as 80 percent , especially by those free-spendin g Americans who go on expensive Gree k cruises...
...we judge them . More important is that future generations will judge us on how well we d o this, just as we judge past civilizations for why they died . With terrorism w e have barely begun...
...even Greece" i t was proudly stated) had settled on afte r the American raid on Libya...
...Theodora-copulos . To be sure, there is little likelihoo d that Papandreou will do anything ma-jor to disrupt the Alliance...
...It just serves the interest of one big country and if you sign the list you stop having your ow n foreign policy...
...For another, despite the undoubted expertise of part of that in-ternational body in this area, the U.N...
...As schoolchildren we are nursed with tales of the land betwee n the Tigris and Euphrates without ever learning that this "cradle of civiliza-tion" is modern Iraq...
...For one thing, most of us know the dif-ference between, say, planting a bomb on board a civilian flight from Rome and an attack on a Soviet garrison in Afghanistan...
...The Assad visit taxed the powers of even the cheeries t of optimists who speak fondly of a "thaw" in Greece's relations with it s own allies...
...Remember that this all comes at a time when the entire Western half of Europe is busy trying to convince tour-ists that fear about terrorism is un-founded...
...In the task we ough t to ask the help of all those who are committed to our same values...
...But to hear op-position parties' complaints, you'd never know it . Their effort to liken th e museum plans to plans by Nazis is ex-actly the kind of hysterical, Weimarstyle debate Germany is trying to lear n to avoid...
...Assad's paradox, ex-cept that his arrows all reach thei r targets...
...Ger-mans argue that it's not enough to visi t the country to bring back the past, and it's true older people traveling to Berli n weep as they see grim reminders...
...Perhaps in this light the pro -gression from Pericles to Papandreou is not that exceptional...
...As for calling upon the U.N...
...The West German government is a democratic one—it's survived longer than the oft-cited Weimar Republic and Third Reich combined...
...he asked...
...If Papandreou is not, we would do bes t to ask him to get out of our light . 0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1986...
...So as of this writing the Libyan People's Bureau is still full, with another 300 students also living in the country unmolested...
...For that reason , everyone says, don't worry about what Papandreou says, watch what he does...
...But more and more visitors are young—grand-children, not children, of Nazis . Their guides, too, are of the third generation . Germany is a museum about evil...
...bases here and Greek membership in the European Community are not so bad after all, a remarkable turnaround for a man who only a short time ago could be heard referring to the two as "wolves' dens...
...They stare out bus windows at pastoral spot s in Berlin's Wannsee, the city 's Scars-dale, where Jews lined up to board car s to concentration camps further east . They stand mute at the Brandenburg Gate, remembering how they walked through it in the days before it wa s blocked by the Wall...
...Then he appears in Greece to denounce ter-rorism in general and—surprise!—th e American position in particular, ex-plaining that of course "national liberation struggles" cannot be con-sidered terrorism...
...base...
...still later we read Gibbons's paean to the Romans with -out ever connecting these efficient con-querors with the Italians we know and love today...
...and the U.S...
...The question was onl y a bit of diplomatic modesty, for he was in fact quite clear that the U.S...
...Things are getting better— why, Papandreou didn't even denounce Shultz during the latter's visit here, surely a sign of good will (or, better yet, "pragmatism...
...Not only that, but with economic austerity Greeks are becoming less receptive to the Socialist party line...
...Who are we or anyone else to say that this or that country supports ter-rorism...
...The Federal Govern-ment had once hoped to have the new history museum ready for the anniversary...
...is hardly the place to hash out a defini -tion of terrorism, inasmuch as many o f its members are our chief suspects . We don't ask thieves, rapists, an d murderers to wrestle with the lega l distinctions regarding their respective professions...
Vol. 19 • August 1986 • No. 8
