An Imaginary White House Attack
Time magazine columnist Joe Klein last week went after the Bush White House for what he alleged was its reflexive technique for dealing with unpleasant news: “destroy the messenger.” Klein’s evidence?
Take it from The Scrapbook, Joe: You need to find yourself a better class of prominent Republican, starting with one who reads his email and doesn’t lie to you about its contents. We’re assuming, of course, that your source even received the email, although he may simply have read a rumor of its existence on an especially hysterical anti-Bush blog, which claimed that “the White House revenge-team is out to get Brent Scowcroft.”
Why does The Scrapboook speak with such confidence about your source’s unreliability? Because, notwithstanding our own lack of prominence, we received the email in question. Not only were we not disgusted, we actually read it, and it was about as ad hominem as a seminar paper.
The “attack” was headlined “Responding to Brent Scowcroft,” and contained no talking points. Rather, it accurately summarized the New Yorker profile and “offered some thoughts in response” to Scowcroft’s critique of Bush’s foreign policy. The most pungent of which read as follows: “The charge that the way we have sought to bring democracy to Iraq is ‘you invade, you threaten and pressure, you evangelize’ is itself deeply misleading. Mr. Scowcroft’s ‘invasion’ was in fact a liberation–and overthrowing one of the worst tyrannies in modern times and replacing it with free elections is a good start on the pathway to liberty.”
If this is the “politics of personal destruction,” Washington could use more of it. Not so Joe Klein’s reporting. How to put this? Let’s just say, We’re so disgusted we’re going to start deleting his damn stories before we read them.
Congratulations
We note with satisfaction that Robert Conquest’s name is among the winners of this year’s Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award, has lost a certain amount of its luster over time, and this year’s class is fairly typical: Recipients now routinely include retiring senior administration officials (Alan Greenspan, Gen. Richard Myers), popular professional athletes (Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicklaus, Frank Robinson), and aging-but-not-quite dormant figures from show business (Andy Griffith, Carol Burnett, Aretha Franklin). We’re not entirely certain where Robert Conquest fits in this company, but his award surely restores the medal’s distinction for this season.
Conquest, a British subject long resident in America, is not just a great historian, but a scholar whose original labors on the Soviet Union became part of the history of the 20th century. His seminal work The Great Terror (1968) was in its day the most searching, most fearless, most comprehensive, and most devastating account of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s that had ever been published. It still is.
Conquest was not the first to chronicle the horrors of the Soviet regime–and, of course, he was writing at a time when Stalin’s heirs still ruled in the Kremlin–but until The Great Terror, neither the scope nor the magnitude of the devastation had been fully appreciated outside the Soviet empire. It goes without saying that The Great Terror, and his subsequent Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, were greeted with derision among most Kremlinologists, and among Western intellectuals generally, for their stern rebuke of Soviet apologists in Europe and America, and Conquest’s insight that Stalin was no aberration but a logical consequence of Marxism-Leninism and the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is not every prophet who is honored in his adopted country, or lives to see his work so richly vindicated. The Medal of Freedom is not just a satisfying badge of achievement, but a measure of the debt we owe pioneers like Robert Conquest.
We should perhaps add a postscript: Despite the solemnity of his scholarly work and the award honoring it, Conquest is by no means a typically ponderous academic but a riotously funny versifier and wit. Asked by his publisher for a new title to a revised edition of The Great Terror, following the Soviet collapse, Conquest replied, “How about I Told You So, You F–Fools?”
Galloway Update
The Scrapbook is not a habitual reader of the East London Advertiser, a paper based in the parliamentary district of England’s most notorious Saddam-sympathiser, George Galloway. But we couldn’t help noticing the Advertiser‘s exclusive story last week on its hometown MP.
“George Galloway’s close friend and spokesman Ron McKay has admitted receiving almost $16,000 from the Jordanian businessman linked to the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal,” it began. “Mr. McKay told the Advertiser he had now checked his bank statements and confirmed a $15,666 payment from Fawaz Zureikat was made into his personal account in August 2000.”
McKay claimed “the cash was for legitimate business reasons, but he refused to give any more details.” Though he admitted having had “many business dealings with Fawaz Zureikat over the years,” McKay insisted the payment in question had “nothing to do with oil.”
Far be it from The Scrapbook to question the probity of a Galloway pal like McKay. But we thought we’d mention this passage from the final report of Paul Volcker’s independent U.N. commission, issued on October 27:
[But] Ministry of Oil records show that . . . a total of 18 million barrels of oil were allocated to Mr. Galloway, either directly or indirectly through Mr. Zureikat, and nearly two-thirds of the oil was lifted. According to Iraqi officials, oil allocations were granted to fund Mr. Galloway’s anti-sanctions activities. Iraqi officials identified Mr. Zureikat as acting on Mr. Galloway’s behalf to conduct the oil transactions in Baghdad. . . .
Iraqi officials have confirmed that Mr. Zureikat’s allocations classified as “United Kingdom” were intended to benefit Mr. Galloway’s anti-sanctions campaign, and those classified as “Jordan” were for the benefit of Mr. Zureikat personally.
A Senate panel led by Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman corroborated these findings. Both the Coleman and Volcker inquiries also have bank records to support their charges.
In a splendidly Clintonian defense, Zureikat told the Associated Press that he and Galloway “didn’t break any Jordanian laws.” No, of course not. They just violated international sanctions, did business with a genocidal dictator, stole money from Iraqis, and then lied about it. Other than that, they’re clean.
If You Believe This, We Have a Bridge for Sale
“‘Karl does not have any real enemies in the White House,’ . . . said a GOP strategist.”
(“Rove’s Future Role Is Debated,” Washington Post, Nov. 3)
