Clintonites speak out, Tim Robbins too.

An exhaustive Nexis search turns up just 165 mentions of this group in the previous 19 years–until April 17, 2003, when it made headlines. Why the sudden interest? Because the chairman and two members of the committee resigned in protest over the supposed looting of the National Museum of Iraq. As the Washington Post headline on the front page of the Style section excitedly put it, “Bush Panel Members Quit Over Looting: Cultural Advisers Say U.S. Military Could Have Prevented Museum Losses.”

Washington lives for such moments of high drama–a rebuke to the president! Principled resignations by members of his own team! Think Cy Vance departing the Carter State Department over the attempted hostage rescue in Iran; Anthony Lake quitting the Nixon NSC staff over the bombing in Cambodia. And now, Martin E. Sullivan, chairman of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, who, the Post reported, wrote a resignation letter to the president complaining that, “While our military forces have displayed extraordinary precision and restraint . . . in securing the Oil Ministry and oil fields–they have been nothing short of impotent in failing to attend to the protection of [Iraq’s] cultural heritage.”

Sullivan, the Post noted, was resigning a chairmanship he had held since 1995. 1995? Yes, if you do the arithmetic you’ll notice that the people the Post coyly refers to as “Bush panel members” are holdover Clinton appointees. Somehow, this useful bit of data failed to make it into the Post’s account.

Sullivan, to be fair, wasn’t hiding anything. He acknowledged that he was shortly going to be replaced anyway and that his resignation was therefore “simply symbolic.” But it was an astonishing bit of naivete–if that’s what it was–for the leading paper in a company town, where the company business is politics, to leave out a political angle to the resignations.

Now, why did we refer above to the “supposed looting”? It’s true that the museum was sacked. But it’s not at all clear who did it, when it happened (whether before or after U.S. forces took Baghdad), or even whether it was looting at all. The same day the resignations were announced, a number of experts said the evidence pointed to a theft, with help from inside the museum. “It looks as if at least part of the theft was a very deliberate planned action,” said McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian architecture at the University of Chicago and president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad. “They were able to obtain keys from somewhere for the vaults and were able to take out the very important, the very best material.”

So it’s not clear whether the disaster at the National Museum was the first failure of the U.S. occupation or the last act of Baathist perfidy, and in the moral accounting there’s a world of difference between the two. Seem’s like the kind of distinction you might want pinned down before submitting your principled letter of resignation.

There’s No Pity Like Self-Pity

There’s trouble in River City. While allied troops have been busy liberating Iraqis, the forces of oppression have been advancing here in America. A “climate of fear” has descended; people are afraid to speak out; plus, the Baseball Hall of Fame was rude to movie star Susan Sarandon and her companion Tim Robbins.

How do we know people are afraid to speak out? Because a P.R. campaign–complete with television appearances, speeches at the National Press Club, and columns in major news magazines–has alerted us to the crushing of dissent.

Anna Quindlen smuggled out a dispatch last week–headlined “The Sounds of Silence”–to a samizdat journal called Newsweek (worldwide circulation 4.4 million). “Last month,” she reported, “a United Way chapter in Florida disinvited the actress Susan Sarandon from a fund-raising luncheon at which she’d agreed to speak. This was scarcely surprising. . . . With war looming, the Oscar-winning actress, who has been outspokenly liberal on a variety of social issues and consistently critical of the invasion of Iraq, must have suddenly seemed akin to a cactus.”

Worse was in store for Sarandon. The Baseball Hall of Fame, which had planned a 15th anniversary screening and celebration of the movie “Bull Durham,” in which she and Robbins had starring roles, cancelled the event. As Robbins noted in an April 15 speech at the National Press Club, “This is a crucial moment for all of us. . . . Both of us last week were told that both we and the First Amendment were not welcome at the Baseball Hall of Fame.” (The Robbins speech, besides being aired on C-SPAN, was e-mailed to us by Fenton Communications, the leading lefty P.R. firm.)

Strict constructionists will argue that the First Amendment forbids Congress from abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, while saying nothing about Susan Sarandon’s public appearances. But as Justice Douglas famously observed, “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees.”

Or, in this case, by emanations, gaseous in form, from the actress’s life partner. “This past weekend,” Robbins informed us, “Susan and I and the three kids went to Florida for a family reunion of sorts. Amidst the alcohol and the dancing, sugar-rushing children, there was, of course, talk of the war. The most frightening thing about the weekend was the amount of times we were thanked for speaking out against the war because that individual speaking thought it unsafe to do so in their own community in their own life.”

But perhaps we should give the last word to Madonna. “Anybody who has anything to say against the war or against the president or whatever is punished, and that’s not democracy,” she said last week on her VH1 special. The punishment in her case consisted of criticism of her latest music video, which she decided to pull from the air. Oddly enough, “Access Hollywood” gave her complaints the headline “Madonna Speaks Out”–a cruel jest at a time when she is being made to shut up. And if Madonna can be silenced, truly no one is safe.

Happy Purim

MEMRI, the indispensable group that translates the ravings of the Saudi and Egyptian press, informs us that the career of Dr. Umayma Jalahma goes from success to success. Last year, Jalahma published an article in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh warning that for the holiday of Purim, “the Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday pastries. . . . That affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure.” Following high-level protests from the U.S. government, Jalahma was booted from Al-Riyadh–only to end up on another government-funded paper. But last week he lectured at the Arab League’s “Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up” on the origins of the U.S. war against Saddam. (Hint: It was timed to coincide with Purim.) Past guests of the Zayed Center, incidentally, include Al Gore, James Baker, Kurt Waldheim, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Larouche.