Hope Against All Evidence

In the President’s address to the American people on October 7, he talked about “hope against all evidence,” referring to the need to disarm Iraq before Saddam’s plans for nuclear capability come to fruition. It applies wherever prudence dictates that we not wait to discover, as NSC Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, “that the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud.”

In the President’s address to the American people on October 7, he talked about “hope against all evidence,” referring to the need to disarm Iraq before Saddam’s plans for nuclear capability come to fruition. It applies wherever prudence dictates that we not wait to discover, as NSC Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, “that the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud.”

North Korea is part of the President’s Axis of Evil for good reason – it has exported missile and chemical weapons technology to Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere. The government starves its own people – perhaps tens of thousands are dead, but relief organizations don’t operate effectively there, so we don’t have a real total. It is a nasty place. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, the U.S., Japan and South Korea offered North Korea economic and food aid, plus a light water nuclear reactor, in exchange for Pyongyang’s declared abandonment of an indigenous nuclear program. Yesterday, North Korea admitted that it has been cheating – taking the aid and running the program.

News reports this morning say the White House was “shocked” (like Claude Rains in Casablanca). More likely, it is embarrassed because this administration had continued the naïve policy of trying to bribe a dictator out of his murderous intentions.

Nearly 2,000 Palestinians and Israelis died before most (though not all) of the Oslo-process promoters admitted that Arafat was not the peacemaker they had wanted to believe him to be.

More than 3,000 Americans died on September 11th, finally prompting a long overdue review of threats to America, our friends and our interests from violent Islamic radicalism. And finally prompting reconsideration of the origins of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Nearly 200 people died in a bomb blast in Bali before the Indonesian government began to consider a crackdown on a radical Islamic group it had denied existed in that country.

Saddam has killed upwards of 1,000,000 people in his wars against Iran, Kuwait, and internal Shiite and Kurdish populations; he used chemical weapons and missiles against cities.

Yemen admitted this week that the bombing of a French oil tanker was terrorism.

How many people have to die for the education of policy elites?

There are increasing threats to the safety and security of our increasingly small planet. The first step in dealing with them would be to take the lessons of the people who already paid the ultimate price for being in the way, and to stop hoping against experience that “agreements,” “inspections”and the promises of dictators will make us safer.