Clinton Revisionism

Last week, former President Bill Clinton told his staffer-turned-ABC talking head George Stephanopoulos that the U.S. government had "no evidence that there was any weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]." And Clinton has the gall to accuse Bush of lying?

Here's Clinton on July 22, 2003, on Larry King Live: "When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for." And in October 2003, some six months after the war ended, Portuguese prime minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso discussed WMD with Clinton. Said Barroso: "When Clinton was here recently he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."

Details, details. In an interview last month with Wolf Blitzer, Clinton said of the Iraq war: "I never thought it had much to do with the war on terror." Come again? In a speech on February 17, 1998, Clinton warned of threats from an "unholy axis" of terrorists and rogue states, and declared: "There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

Later that spring came this passage from the Clinton administration's indictment of Osama bin Laden: "Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."

That summer, no fewer than six senior Clinton officials accused Iraq of providing chemical weapons expertise to al Qaeda in Sudan. It was this collaboration that administration officials cited to justify the destruction of the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, wrote in the Washington Times that the administration had "information linking bin Laden to the Sudanese regime and to the al Shifa plant."

Berger continued: "We had physical evidence indicating that al Shifa was the site of chemical weapons activity," allowing that al Shifa might have been a dual-use facility. "Other products were made at al Shifa. But we have seen such dual-use plants before--in Iraq. And, indeed, we have information that Iraq has assisted chemical weapons activity in Sudan."

Clinton's revisionism is hardly surprising. He has his wife's future in an increasingly antiwar Democratic party to worry about. But the next time Stephanopoulos hosts his old boss, we'd like to see him ask about al Shifa and the Iraqi collaboration with al Qaeda that the Clinton administration once claimed took place at the plant.

Harvard's Principles

How does Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan feel about the federal government's ban on gays in the military? "I abhor" such discrimination, she announced back in October 2003. It is "repugnant," a "moral injustice of the first order," even. Therefore--moral injustices of the first order being the sort of thing Harvard frowns on--Kagan has throughout her deanship enforced the law school's 26-year-old ban on cooperation with recruiters from employers who exclude homosexuals. Except as regards the Pentagon.

There's this federal law called the Solomon Amendment, see. And under that law, an institution that "prohibits or in effect prevents" Defense Department recruitment efforts on its campus thereby forfeits eligibility for federal funding. Meaning that Kagan's refusal to compromise her convictions threatens to cost Harvard somewhere between $400 and $500 million in federal research grants each year. Meaning that, come to think of it, there are worse things in life than moral injustice, aren't there?

In an email to the "HLS Community" last week, Dean Kagan explained "how much I regret making this exception." And she continues to believe that Pentagon hiring policies are "deeply wrong." But hey, there was money involved. And Harvard University--which has to limp along on total assets of barely $60 billion--obviously can't afford to start taking its own righteousness that seriously, now, can it?

Edwards on Earmarks

With the media's eye on Hillary Clinton's presumed quest for the 2008 Democratic nod, John Edwards saw in Hurricane Katrina an opportunity to resuscitate his political fortunes. Speaking before the D.C.-based Center for American Progress last week, Edwards hit Bush for pursuing policies that hurt "the least of us and the most vulnerable." He even accused Bush of turning a blind eye to congressional pork-barrel spending, saying Bush "never met an earmark he wouldn't approve." Edwards must be taking a cue from John Kerry, who was famously for the $87 billion for our troops before he was against it. In 2003, presidential candidate Edwards told Iowa voters that he wasn't a fan of earmarks but there wasn't much he could do about it.

Because his colleagues slipped pork items into large appropriations bills, he claimed, "it's almost impossible to know what you're voting on." But that wasn't true. Any member of his staff could easily have identified hundreds of pork items, including those earmarked for North Carolina. Edwards also opposed many amendments sponsored by Senator John McCain that would have stripped pork from appropriations bills. One would have used the savings for veterans claims adjudication. Another would have eliminated a $2 million earmark (on top of the $1.5 million earmarked the previous year) to refurbish a statue of Vulcan, God of Fire and Iron, in Birmingham, Alabama. Today, McCain and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma are trying to get senators to forswear pork projects to help offset Katrina's reconstruction costs. If anyone believes a Senator Edwards would now be supporting them, The Scrapbook has a $223 million "bridge to nowhere" to sell you in rural Alaska.

Eugene Explains It All

A fine moment in explanatory journalism, from Eugene Robinson's Sept. 20 Washington Post column:

"I'm a print-media guy to the bone, but I have to give props to the way my colleagues in television have covered Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. (Note to Tom [Brokaw] and Dan [Rather]: 'Props' is a good thing.)"

Eugene, baby, talk to the hand! That slang is so 10 years ago--get over your bad self now.

Simon Wiesenthal,1908-2005

The death of Simon Wiesenthal, full of age and honors, is not a tragedy. But it was the central tragedy of the 20th century, the Holocaust, which transfigured his life, and made his name indelible in history's account book.

Wiesenthal had barely survived the German death camps, and was well into middle age, when he founded a "documentation center" in his native Austria to track down Nazi war criminals and bring them to trial. At a time when Europe had barely recovered from the shock of the war, and the past was already being distorted and obscured, Wiesenthal took it upon himself to seek neither "closure" nor some transcendent meaning in Treblinka and Auschwitz, but to express the outrage of civilization by pursuing truth and justice. As Walter Berns wrote in 1979, "Wiesenthal allows us to see that it is right, morally right, to be angry with criminals and to express that anger publicly, officially, and in an appropriate manner."

Wiesenthal's name became synonymous with holding war criminals to account, but in the realm of retributive justice, two guiding principles made him unique. First, he did not believe in collective punishment--Germans who did the right thing deserved recognition--and he insisted on documentary evidence for accusations. In a world in which crimes against humanity are charged every day, and often on the basis of competing ideology, he personified the standard for justice, not revenge.

As Simon Wiesenthal knew, the Holocaust happened to the Jews; but war crimes and genocide--from Armenia to Rwanda--are shameful chapters in the history of the world, which cannot be forgotten, concealed, or excused.