Public Nuisances
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Public Nuisances" BILLY DILI —WASHINGTON could be surprised when our debonair president took a breather from the war on terror to spoof his grandstanding predecessor? He sent Bill Clinton as Washington's...
...History will not disturb the flow of their criticism...
...That is good for them...
...But only the Aztecs favored suicide both for religious and military purposes...
...For Pearl Harbor's relevance to September 11, consult the history books—most recently Thomas Fleming's The New Dealers'War...
...Possibly the Aztecs had more respect for human life...
...Condi Rice tells me East Timor's capital is called Dili...
...The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was but the most relevant precedent for analyzing September 11...
...Long ago some ancient Chinese favored circumstantial suicide, as did the adepts of early Hinduism...
...In the Clinton years, the terrorists' activities were merely the provocation for bluster and several sallies into "wag the dog" political tactics...
...and they did it on a grander scale than have the Palestinians, at least so far...
...The calm with which the world witnesses the use of young suicides as instruments of war is particularly startling given our many pieties...
...The similarities with Hiss do not end here...
...Or is it simply that so few modern minds think about the past...
...He sent Bill Clinton as Washington's representative to East Timor's independence ceremonies...
...While visiting recently with ex-White House aides in Los Angeles, Clinton—the Los Angeles Times tells us—quoted prodigiously from David Brock's admittedly mendacious book about Clinton's critics...
...It would be reassuring if, while reviewing CIA and FBI performance prior to September 11, they read some history and came to recognize that not only incompetent intelligence officers had a hand in allowing terrorism to spread, politicians and pundits, too, played a role...
...Jimmy Carter became a carpenter and won a tortured title emblematic of the liberal Democrats' tortured condition, "America's greatest ex-president...
...The CIA and the FBI's failures have been—as all such failures inevitably are—human failures, but there were other causes now apparently lost to the mists of history...
...That this misbehavior had precedents in earlier administrations, for instance those of FDR and JFK, went unremarked.Yet the consequence was to hobble the FBI from gathering intelligence on just the kind of groups as the one that flew hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon...
...its sup-port of a president who moved the Democrats to the political center is more complicated...
...The next Clinton news stories are going to be datelined, `Dili.' "And so they were...
...For over a decade Bill has been apologizing for America's behavior in Africa, in Central America, in wars with the Red Indian, in its treatment of various endangered species...
...The president knows how to deal with a pest...
...So today those who indulge in or approve the practices of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are in cultural terms at one with the 15th-century Aztecs...
...We are against child labor, and there are boycotts in the Western world against "giant corporations"that employ child labor in the Third World, though such laborers may be bettering themselves financially and living far better than when sitting in the dirt of a backward village...
...Then he goes on to compare her to the Mona Lisa, though I am sure the local mullahs would not approve of this dependence on infidel art...
...From the early 1930s on, there was ample evidence that the Japanese could devastate Pearl in a sneak attack and increasing evidence right up to that "date which will live in infamy" that the attack was coming...
...The CIA and FBI have been barred from doing some of the kinds of work that are essential for the surveillance of terrorists...
...In suicidal war and in religious ceremonies as many as 20,000 Aztecs, historians tell us, sought to please the sun god in happy dispatch, which might also explain why the Aztecs never had much of a population problem...
...and in London, where he often stiffs his hosts.Yet his junkets are not without a serious goal...
...Political grandstanding caused the FBI's focus to widen and blur every time the pols came up with a new crime to federalize...
...Why did other aggrieved peoples not think of this useful expedient...
...CHILD LABOR —WASHINGTON t is a peculiarity of modern times that as the brutality rises to a more atrocious level, we become inured to the atrocity...
...I wonder if he quoted Brock in faraway Dili...
...I can hear the president now, joshing with his advisers, "And guys get this...
...He claims his critics practice tabloid journalism, but Brock's book is as reckless with fact as any tabloid story.Yet thousands on the left take satisfaction in Brock's book, too.They have made it a best-seller for weeks...
...One wonders which passages Clinton takes satisfaction in...
...In parts of Araby it is socially approved for the young to strap themselves in explosives and wander into the civilian neighborhoods of Israel for the purpose of blowing everyone nearby sky high...
...In her classic Pearl Harbor: Warning 78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 1ISANCES Y R R E L L, J R. and Decision, Roberta Wohlstetter explained the intelligence lapse at Pearl...
...As for last summer's "intelligence breakdown," its ancestry can be traced to Senator Frank Church and his colleagues on the Senate select intelligence committee of the 1970s...
...Do the past blunders chasten them...
...Now Church's successors are investigating the CIA and FBI...
...For weeks Clinton had been pop-ping up in the news whining about the Florida vote count, fretting about imagined slights and complaining that the Bush administration never seeks his foreign policy guidance...
...That the capital of the new country is called Dili just adds to the joke...
...But the most grievous blow came at the Church hearings, where they lost them-selves in harangues against the Nixon administration's misbehavior...
...The left cannot admit Clinton's critics were correct and has fallen for his claim that "the right" did him in...
...It sits on their coffee tables...
...I bet George II telephoned Bill in his Harlem office and told him to bring a ukulele and expect the girls to be wearing grass skirts...
...Is our columnist planning a contest, loosely translated as, "Name the Prettiest Suicide Bomber...
...They speak of September 11 and the "intelligence breakdown" as if both had neither precedents nor ancestry...
...Not if they are studiously unaware of them...
...In the past, its analysts have had a passable record, but by last summer the CIA had become sufficiently bureaucratized to fail to distinguish the ominous signs of imminent danger from the "noise...
...Well, Bill, party on...
...This, Wohlstetter termed "noise" By the mid-1940s, our leaders set up an agency to analyze intelligence so that never again would "noise" distract them...
...New refutations of its contents appear regularly...
...For instance, plenty of evidence preceded Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union and North Korea's attack on South Korea.Yet Stalin and the South Koreans were caught unaware...
...He is as intent as Alger Hiss once was on proving his innocence of all charges—even the ones he has admitted to in court...
...Books are being written in his defense...
...The recently passed Patriot Act relaxes some of those restrictions...
...The same gaudy congressional grandstanding that has distracted the CIA and the FBI has confused the electorate about an emerging threat to our national security...
...During Nazi occupation, why did the Poles or the Czechs not wrap themselves in explosives and blow up German officers' hang outs...
...With Clinton the torturedcondition takes a new, more preposterous twist...
...Richard Nixon read and wrote books, and advanced from disgraced president to elder statesman...
...Inspired by published pictures of the four female suicide bombers, the columnist writes of Miss Indriss's "dreamy eyes and a mysterious smile on her lips...
...I hope we can all make the most of it...
...Bill Clinton quotes Brock...
...Clinton parties in the Big Apple, in L.A...
...James Q. Wilson recently noted that there have been other breaches of the peace that leaders might have anticipated...
...but first he blamed America for not being "sufficiently sensitive...
...1970s-era congressional restrictions have until recently made it more difficult for federal agencies to conduct some wiretaps and certain searches than for local police agencies...
...We oppose Third World parents selling their children into slavery...
...In so doing we have come to accept the grotesque and the macabre as part of life...
...As with those who read the tabloids, Brock's readers know Martians never impeached Bill Clinton, but they want to believe something dreadful happened and so they read Brock...
...Sobered by war, the pols have acted prudently in creating this legislation, but if I sense the currents in Washington correctly, they are now being tempted to give the Church committee a reprise...
...but both groups were only intent on improving the humors of their dyspeptic gods...
...Is it too disturbing to think that the modern suicide bomber is following a course hitherto only approved of by 15th-century aboriginal peoples devoted to the humors of the sun god...
...Ike played golf and elder states-man...
...Make the most of it...
...INTELLIGENCE SHORTAGE —WASHINGTON mericans' antipathy to the study of history is a boon for pundits and politicians, especially when they feel the urge to declaim on urgent matters...
...BILLY DILI —WASHINGTON o could be surprised when our debonair president took a breather from the war on terror to spoof his grandstanding predecessor...
...In the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafid a columnist writes about the anatomical charms of Miss Wafa Indriss, one of the Palestinian women who broke with Islam's strictures against female participation in public life to become a suicide bomber...
...The solid evidence of an impending attack was not discerned by our government's leaders because of their prejudices, an abundance of false warnings and misleading intelligence...
...Is it more acceptable to sell one's daughter into suicide than into slavery...
...The only thing the impeached ex-president has not apologized for is his personal treatment of various women, some very young, others, such as Juanita Broaddrick, very bruised...
...He gives inane speeches and claims to be writing a memoir, but frequent news stories suggest a middle-aged arrested adolescent, doing what disturbed teenagers do: hanging out...
...Facts will not interrupt their moral indignation...
...This is a point I have not yet seen in the relaxed commentary on this atrocity...
...And even in the West, many accept the pro-Palestinian claims that these murderers are driven to their grisly deeds by "despair" or "desperation" caused by Israel's commitment to its security...
...Our pundits and pols, expounding on SepPUBLIC T BY R . F M M E I tember 11 and the concomitant "intelligence breakdown" in vacua, can do so with the greatest freedom imaginable...
...So the puckish son of George I sends Clinton in his baggy pants off to East Timor, where he can wear a funny hat and ogle the girls...
...JULY/AUGUST 2002 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 79...
...From Dili our great big lovable lug of an ex-president actually told his audience, "It [East Timor's independence] took too long to come, but now it is here...
...So where is the outrage when the Saudis and Sad-dam reward Palestinian families whose children commit homicidal suicide...
...Nonetheless, reports the Times, "Clinton, who seems to have practically committed passages to memory, told his former aides whenever they feel down, they should read Brock's book to illuminate anew what they were all fighting against for eight years, and as a reminder of what `unhappy' people their counterparts on the right truly are...
...it allows them to exempt their class from past foolishness, and particularly in the case of the "intelligence breakdown," from any responsibility that history attests to...
...What will come next in the pages of Al-Wafid...
...He could have been talking about almost anything...
...I can understand the left's support of the accused Communist, Hiss...
...The agency was called the CIA...
...Harry Truman spent his golden years reading history and writing a pretty good memoir...
...And I have to wonder why...
...So the suicide bombers are Israel's responsibility It reminds me of the Cold War, when every effort we made to protect our-selves was seen by the anti-anti-Communists as the cause of Communist insecurity and militarism...
Vol. 35 • July 2002 • No. 4
