Believe it or not, the Clinton administration has finally managed to work up some outrage over international arms-dealing last week.
This is an administration, recall, that has shown it is not about to let China's nuclear and chemical-weapons chicanery interfere with the president's glorious June summit in Beijing. A couple of interesting things emerged over the last month on this score. First, China was caught trying to give Iran chemicals for producing highly enriched uranium, in direct contravention of promises Beijing made to Clinton at the last summit. Then it was revealed that the administration has been extremely lax, to say the least, about allowing American companies to provide China with sensitive information to improve the guidance systems of its ICBMs, perhaps in violation of the law. So while China arms the mullahs and improves its intercontinental-missile capability -- with a technological assist from American companies run by big Democratic-party donors -- where is the administration?
Well, it's about to crack down but not on China. The New York Times relayed the news last week: The administration has discovered that thousands of American pistols and rifles sold to European buyers may have ended up in Yugoslavia, Algeria, and Turkey. Egad! The State Department "is on the verge of revoking all outstanding licenses for firearms exports to British companies." That will show them.
Administration officials are calling their discovery (which surely has nothing to do with domestic gun-control politics) the "European Union loophole."
THE SCRAPBOOK thinks it knows a way for American exporters to survive the threatened shut-off of small-arms sales to Europe. The companies now selling pistols to England should: a) increase the caliber of the weapons they are shipping by a few orders of magnitude; b) start selling to adversaries and not allies; and c) get up-to-date on their pledges to the DNC. Then maybe the president will stop his State Department from hassling them.