RETURN OF THE SADDAM APOLOGIST When former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter first surfaced after the September 11 attacks, he sought to persuade America that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “presents a threat to no one.” America laughed, made a mental note that Ritter had recently taken $400,000 from a Hussein sympathizer to produce a pro-Saddam documentary, and shrugged off his delusional happy talk about the lack of nuclear, biological, and chemical threats from Iraq (see Stephen F. Hayes’s “Saddam Hussein’s American Apologist,” in our November 19, 2001, issue). Now Ritter is back selling the same rug to the Christian Science Monitor–which on January 23 published his op-ed, “Iraq: The Phantom Threat.” While he spent much of the piece regurgitating his old arguments, he went further in order to respond to recent developments. In recent weeks, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and others have reported on the goings-on at Salman Pak, a training camp in Iraq for both Iraqi and non-Iraqi terrorists. Their information comes directly from two former high-ranking Iraqi military officers who helped run the camp. Among their revelations: the existence of a Boeing 707 airplane used to train non-Iraqi “Islamic radicals” in the practice of hijacking. “We could see them train around the fuselage,” one of the defectors, a five-year veteran of the camp, told the New York Times. “We could see them practice taking over the plane.” “These Islamic radicals were a scruffy lot,” said a second defector. “They needed a lot of training, especially physical training. But from speaking with them it was clear they came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this.” Not surprisingly, Ritter is skeptical. He laces his article with quotation marks insinuating that the defectors are providing bad “information,” and doing so at the direction of the Defense Department. “The facility at Salman Pak does exist,” Ritter ruefully concedes, in a head-fake towards the truth. (This is not really much of a concession, though, since U.N. weapons inspectors visited the camp in 1995, and satellite photos by Space Imaging confirm its existence.) Nonetheless, he’s unconcerned by the fact that Saddam is training terrorists. Why? “Its use as an al Qaeda training camp is unsubstantiated,” he argues (emphasis added). So long as terrorists don’t self-identify as al Qaeda, apparently, they’re not a threat. A CRITIC FOR ALL SEASONS Tom Shales, television critic for the Washington Post, gave the president’s speech a surprisingly warm review, comparing Bush’s smiling visage to the million-dollar grin of Paul Newman and the president’s easy manner to the made-for-TV style of Dick Cavett (and likening Ted Kennedy to the Nickelodeon channel’s cult cartoon hero SpongeBob SquarePants). But our favorite part was his brush-off of old what’s-his-name–you know, the guy who was president between the two Bushes. “As for Bush’s predecessor in the White House, he is not missed when it’s time for a speech, even though his smooth delivery and bouncy energy were much admired in his day. The party-boy grin would be unseemly now, and not the sort of thing one wears to a war on terrorism.” All true and well said, though The Scrapbook wonders which of Clinton’s admirers the Post critic had in mind. Himself, perhaps? In Clinton’s day, reviewing those endless State of the Union marathons, Shales did sometimes sound like he was writing annual reports for the Bubba Fan Club. His eyelash-batting 1999 review noted Clinton’s “infectious and good-natured” ad-libbing and said the president looked “boyishly enthusiastic” and “fearlessly confident.” And the gushing did not stop there. Clinton seemed “a man . . . determined to overcome perhaps the greatest adversity of all: his own weakness as a human being.” This was mere weeks after the president was impeached, a sad day perhaps for First Fan Shales, which might just excuse this memorably fawning closer: “The star of the show was in full tele-glittery glory.” But enough. As someone once said, it’s time to move on, which Shales deserves credit for finally doing. KARL ROVE, LEADING INDICATOR What turns out to have been the most accurate preview of Bush’s State of the Union speech? Karl Rove’s widely criticized (for crass partisanship) speech last month to the Republican National Committee. “We can go to the American people on the issue of winning this war,” Rove said, and “not just because of the inspiring leadership of our president since September 11.” Why then? Because Americans “understand two things,” he said. One is they know “much is yet to be done” in combating terrorism and rogue nations with weapons of mass destruction. The other is “they trust the Republican party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America.” Democrats fumed over this, insisting Rove was making the war a partisan issue. Lost in the hullabaloo was how many of the themes underneath the partisan spin made it into the president’s address. ROGUE SECRETARIES OF STATE Was that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright we saw on the “Today” show, getting all snippy with Matt Lauer over Bush’s phrase “axis of evil”? LAUER: “He used the term ‘axis of evil’ in referring to North Korea, Iran and Iraq. . . . Does he run the risk of alienating some of our allies by making statements like that?” ALBRIGHT: “Absolutely. And–because we know that they are not supportive of what we are doing in Iraq, or Iran or North Korea. And so I don’t know what the value is.” No, she wouldn’t. Albright was the one who tried to stamp out use of the phrase “rogue states” by U.S. officials to describe the North Koreas of the world. Lest they take offense. She dubbed them “states of concern.” Truth in labeling has never been her strong point. HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, EVERYBODY DOES IT Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, moments before the president’s State of the Union address last week, describing for “NewsHour” viewers the usefulness of recycling phrases from earlier works: GWEN IFILL: “Doris, I want to ask you this, and also Roger, because you both have worked in White Houses. How important is it to the White House to take a long historical look at how one presents a message like this, what priorities one puts in the speech, how one pulls it together?” GOODWIN: “Oh, I think there’s no question that the speechwriters go back and look at other speeches and other State of the Unions. In fact, I remember one time a funny column where the columnist was able to show similar phrases in about three different presidential State of the Unions, because you look back and you get that sense of history.” GLASS HOUSES DEPT. An item on this page two weeks ago mocked people who confuse James Earl Ray with James Earl Jones. In what was either an unfortunate accident or a case of instantaneous divine retribution, The Scrapbook in the process identified Lanny Frattare, the Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster who bungled the James Earl issue, as Larry Frattare. We are duly chagrined.
