WHEN FROGS ATTACK Take a minute, won’t you please, to acknowledge the sufferings of a too often overlooked class of victims in this war-on-terrorism business and the associated crisis in the Middle East. We mean, of course, French political activists and intellectuals, who are stretched awfully thin at the moment. There is national tradition to be upheld–so some of them have flown off to Ramallah, the better to assist a foreign dictator currently murdering Jewish people. There are beaux gestes to be made–so French president Jacques Chirac and prime minister Lionel Jospin have dispatched celebrity thinker Bernard-Henri Levy to Afghanistan to help with post-Taliban reconstruction efforts. Levy says he will offer the Karzai government “words that carry the weight of deeds, texts that are also acts.” Because, lookit: “Even when philosophy went through its Spinozist-Althusserian phase, it still believed thinking could equate to doing.” So much thinking to be done, so little time. Not enough time, for example, for the post-Spinozist-Althusserians to come up with an effective response to France’s recent wave of synagogue firebombings. But still enough time–always enough time–to read books! One book, in particular, which is Number 1 on the Amazon/France bestseller list and still “flying off the shelves” at the FNAC megastore in Paris. This would be “11 Septembre 2001: L’Effroyable Imposture,” by Thierry Meyssan, president of the leftist think tank Reseau Voltaire. “L’Effroyable Imposture” (“The Appalling Fraud”) argues, as its cover-copy indicates, that “Aucun avion ne s’est ecrase sur le Pentagone!”–no plane crashed into the Pentagon. “I believe the government is lying,” Meyssan has told reporters; the Americans, he contends, deliberately blew up their own Defense Department headquarters. Which is a very American kind of thing to do, as anyone who has studied the mise-en-scene of a Sylvester Stallone movie can tell you. Monsieur Meyssan finds proof for his theory in the official account of the September 11 Pentagon disaster. Where are the wings and fuselage of this so-called American Airlines Flight 77, he wonders? Why are there no photographs of the wreckage? Could a Boeing 757 flying 350 miles per hour and carrying thousands of gallons of combustible jet fuel really get smashed into nothingness merely by the force of a head-on collision with the world’s largest concrete-and-steel office building? Incroyable, non? Also, Meyssan asks sarcastically, “What became of the passengers. . . . Are they dead?” Actually, yes, they are dead. And since texts are also acts, Thierry Meyssan–along with the thousands of Frenchmen who have bought his ludicrous book–owe the grieving relatives an apology. POLLS APART President Clinton’s habit of polling everything from where to take his vacation to what kind of pet to get has been thoroughly mocked. Even George W. Bush has occasionally joined in the fun. In his cover story for the latest Washington Monthly, Joshua Green reports an anecdote about a luncheon last year at the White House for former presidential press secretaries. The president dropped by and discussed some of the domestic security issues the White House was grappling with. At which point, “former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers piped up, ‘What do the poll numbers say?’ All eyes turned to Bush. Without missing a beat, the famous Bush smirk crossed the president’s face and he replied, ‘In this White House, Dee Dee, we don’t poll on something as important as national security.'” Green uses this as his point of departure in going after Bush for what the writer apparently believes is an epic case of Washington hypocrisy: President Bush, it turns out, has pollsters! And they do lots of polling! Just like Clinton! Well, truthfully, not just like Clinton. Going through the records of the Republican National Committee, Green comes up with an estimate of about $1 million spent on polling in Bush’s first year, about half of Clinton’s first year spending. But a more revealing distinction between the two presidencies is this fact, which Green, bizarrely, seems to think reflects unflatteringly on Bush: “While Clinton used polling to craft popular policies, Bush uses polling to spin unpopular ones–arguably a much more cynical undertaking.” Huh? Arguably how? We’d like to see the “argument” according to which polling to drum up support for unpopular policies is more cynical than polling to find out what your policy should be in the first place. Green is smart enough to avoid fleshing out his “arguably” clause. Not so Maureen Dowd, who built a whole column last week around Green’s piece, gamely trying to defend the proposition that Bush’s polling is more cynical than Clinton’s. Here’s her best shot: “At least Mr. Clinton’s impulse was democratic. He yearned to do what we wanted him to do. . . . Mr. Bush’s impulse is autocratic. He wants to do what he (or Cheney & Rove) wants to do–and is desperate only to find a way to shove it down our throats.” You can call that feeble, or you can call it taking one for the team. Either way, we suspect the “revelation” that the Bush team polls as an adjunct to and not a substitute for policymaking is going to strike people who remember the Dick Morris era as something to be relieved about, not scandalized by. SADDAM’S APOLOGIST, CONT. Speculation that Scott Speicher, a pilot shot down in Iraq during the Gulf War, might still be alive in an Iraqi prison led to an offer on March 24 from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry “to prove our goodwill . . . and refute the repeated U.S. fabrications against Iraq.” The Iraqis offered to receive a team of inspectors, provided it’s led by former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter. As readers of this magazine will remember from Stephen F. Hayes’s Nov. 19, 2001, cover story (“Saddam Hussein’s American Apologist”), Ritter was the most dogged U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq throughout the mid-1990s, but later converted to the view that Saddam Hussein has been victimized by America. Others are perhaps unaware of the 180-degree turn in Ritter’s views. Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren asked Ritter why Saddam Hussein would welcome him back. Ritter: “Well, that’s actually a good question to be asking the Iraqis because, frankly speaking, I was stunned when I–when I was made aware of this.” Our guess is that Iraq’s invitation has something to do with Ritter’s recently released documentary, “In Shifting Sands.” Ritter’s film was financed by $400,000 from Shakir Al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-American businessman who helps Saddam Hussein put on “expatriate conferences.” Ritter has acknowledged, in an interview with this magazine, that Al-Khafaji is “openly sympathetic with the regime in Baghdad.” Despite this, Ritter claims in a March 26 article for the Albany Times-Union that U.S. government officials had contacted him about going on the mission. We can’t verify that, but in the unlikely event the Bush administration is considering sending Ritter, we hope they’ll watch his Iraqi-financed propaganda film first. ON DELAY, ON DELAY House Majority Whip Tom DeLay last week gave the finest speech on events in the Middle East by any official in Washington. It got somewhat overtaken by the president’s speech the next day, which may explain why it didn’t get more attention, or maybe the media just have too much invested in their demonizing of DeLay. You can find the full text at majoritywhip.gov. Here’s our favorite passage: “No one should expect the people of Israel to negotiate with groups pursuing the fundamental goal of destroying them. During four decades of terrorism, Yasser Arafat has proven his total contempt for human life. He is completely untrustworthy. So, we should support Israel as they dismantle the Palestinian leadership that foments violence and fosters hate. Arafat and his Authority have been an impediment to peace and a threat to the emergence of moderate Palestinian voices.”
