The Undocumented Mark Steyn (25 page)
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Authors: Mark Steyn
So, on this Saturday afternoon, his unexpected contribution to the trial would clearly be a major part of my coverage. What devastating interjection, I wondered, would he be springing on the prosecutors? The page padded silently over to the senator’s seat in the back. Ted whispered to him, and the page made his way to the end of the row, then worked his way along the row in front, squeezing past senators until he was directly facing Ted’s desk. He then dropped to his knees—which, as it turned out, was the nearest the Clinton trial would ever get to a re-staging of the acts at issue. But instead he leaned under the desk and adjusted Ted’s footrest by an inch and a half. The senior senator from Massachusetts seemed satisfied, and the page was squeezing his
way back past the other senators when Ted motioned him to return. Ignoring a frantic Pat Leahy waving some critical note for Tom Daschle, the page reversed course, squeezed past Senator Graham of Florida yet again and dropped to his knees to move Ted’s footrest another smidgeonette. He then rushed off to pick up Senator Leahy’s note. Senator Kennedy didn’t thank him.
I have been received at Buckingham Palace, and over the years I’ve also met the Queen of Spain, the Queen of the Netherlands, and various other Royal personages. And I can’t imagine any of them demanding of their footmen what Ted Kennedy did. But then they’re only Euro royalty, not Massachusetts royalty. “At the end of the day,” said Evan Bayh of his colleague, “he cared most about the things that matter to ordinary people.” This was, observed many a eulogist, his penance for Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne—or, as the Aussie
Daily Telegraph
’s Tim Blair put it, “She died so that the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act might live.” This, of course, is the classic trade-off of monarchical societies throughout the ages: The sovereign’s industrial-scale exercise of his droit du seigneur with whatever comely serving wench crosses his path is mitigated by his paternalistic compassion toward the humblest of his subjects.
Strange how the monarchical urge persists even in a republic two-and-a-third centuries old.
Time to mothball the Camelot footstools? I hope so.
The Daily Telegraph
, September 22, 2001
ON WEDNESDAY I FINALLY SAW
“Ground Zero.” For those of us who’ve watched the endless TV replays of that second plane slamming into the tower again and again and again, what’s most chilling about the scene in real life is how settled, how established it seems. I was in Oklahoma City six years ago, and in the days afterwards the Murrah Building looked like what it was: a big office block with a huge hole in it, something familiar that’s been ruptured. But here you can no longer discern what the normality was before it got disrupted. It looks, in our terms, like a huge version of a New Jersey landfill that’s gotten a little out of hand. Or, in a broader historical context, like the latter stages of the Germans’ long siege of Stalingrad. Not the opening rounds of a first attack, but the vast accumulated detritus of a long, ongoing war—which, in a sense, is what it is. People are busy at the site, but the urgency has gone. The thousands of flyers posted by wives, husbands, parents, and children are still up, but the word “MISSING” has slid from a long shot to a euphemism.
It impressed the celebrated German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who told a radio interviewer the other day that the destruction of the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art ever.” I’m reminded of the late Sir Thomas Beecham when asked if he’d ever played any Stockhausen: “No,” he said. “But I once stepped in some.” Last week, Stockhausen stepped in his own.
With Oklahoma City I remember the smell of the bodies. At Ground Zero’s burial mound the devastation is so total that there are no bodies to smell. Thousands of people lie under there, all but atomized by their killers and all but forgotten by the appeasing left. At San Francisco’s service of remembrance
for its dead this week, Amos Brown, representing the city’s Board of Supervisors, used the occasion to launch into an examination of the “root causes” of the regrettable incident. “America, what did you do,” he wailed, “in Africa, where bombs are still blasting? America, what did you do in the global warming conference when you did not embrace the smaller nations? America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn’t show up?” The Bay Area lefties roared their approval.
Paul Holm, the partner of Mark Bingham, a gay six-foot, five-inch rugby jock who died on Flight 93, felt differently. He walked up to Senator Dianne Feinstein and said sadly, “This was supposed to be a memorial service.” Then he quit the stage. Mark Bingham died heroically, and all the City of San Francisco can do is denigrate the cause and the nation for which he gave his life.
The totalitarian left has finally found its perfect soul mate. With Communism, the excuse was always that, whatever the practical difficulties on the ground, it retained its theoretical idealism. But the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are perfectly upfront: they’re openly racist; they’d strip Dianne Feinstein of her senatorship and make her a mere chattel; they’d execute Paul Holm for being gay, by building a wall and then crushing him under it. True, I don’t know their position on global warming, but it doesn’t seem to be a priority.
A few blocks north of Ground Zero, I dined with some friends. “This is the biggest event in my life,” said one. “Bigger than the death of Kennedy.” Even the Pearl Harbor comparison doesn’t seem quite right. I wonder if we aren’t revisiting August 1914, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. It seemed a simple war: the British Tommies marching off were told it would all be over by Christmas, as today
Slate
’s Mickey Kaus is confident the World Trade Center will be off the front pages by Thanksgiving. By the time the Great War was really over, four of the world’s great powers lay shattered—the German, Austrian, Russian, and Turkish Empires, all gone and so easily, though who would have predicted it in that last Edwardian summer? We don’t know what this latest thread of history will unravel. But we should at least understand the stakes.
The National Post
, January 7, 2002
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
the “brutal Afghan winter”? It was “fast approaching” back in late September, and apparently it’s still “fast approaching” today. “Winter is fast, fast approaching,” reported ABC’s
Nightline
on September 26.
Two weeks on, New York’s
Daily News
announced that, “realistically, U.S. forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options.”
Two or three weeks passed and the brutal Afghan winter’s relentless approach showed no sign of letting up. “A clock is ticking,” declared
The Oregonian
on October 24. “The harsh Afghan winter is approaching.”
The clock ticked on. On November 8 NBC’s Tom Brokaw alerted viewers to the perils posed by “a rapidly approaching winter.” “They expect the conditions to deteriorate rapidly as the brutal winter soon sets in,” wrote
Newsday
’s Deborah Barfield on November 11, updating her earlier sighting of “the typically brutal winter approaching” a month earlier on October 9.
Another month ticked on, and the brutal winter carried on brutally approaching. “Winter is approaching fast,” said Thomas McDermott, Unicef’s Regional Director, on December 9. “With winter fast approaching, women wait in line for blankets,”
The Los Angeles Times
confirmed, after the clock had ticked leisurely on a couple more days.
And not just any old approaching winter, but the “brutal Afghan winter,” according to ABC, NBC, National Public Radio,
The Boston Globe
, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, etc. “Former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy is in Pakistan”—in case you were wondering—“to find out how to speed up aid deliveries before the brutal Afghan winter sets in,” reported the
BBC in November. “The temperature can drop to 50 below, so cold that eyelids crust and saliva turns to sludge in the mouth,” said Tom Ifield of Knight-Ridder Newspapers.
Yesterday, it was 55 and clear in Kandahar and Herat. Ghurian checked in at 55, with 62 predicted for tomorrow. Fifty-seven and sunny in Bost and Laskar, with 64 expected on Thursday. In Kabul, it was 55, though with the windchill factored in it was only—let me see now—54.
Meanwhile, in Toronto it’s 28, New York 38. Overseas? Belfast and Glasgow report 46, London 44, Birmingham and Manchester 42. If those Afghan refugees clogging up the French end of the Channel Tunnel ever make it through to Dover, they face a gruelling battle for survival against the horrors of the brutal British winter.
Just under four months ago, when the doom-mongers first started alerting us to the “fast approaching” “brutal Afghan winter,” it was 70 degrees and I was sitting here in shorts and T-shirt. Today, in my corner of Quebec, the daytime high is 21, the predicted overnight low is 5 degrees, and tomorrow we’ll be lucky to hit 14. For Saturday, they’re predicting 3 degrees. Three Fahrenheit is, as the metrically inclined would say, minus 16 Celsius. So you’ll understand my amusement at the
Sunday Telegraph
headline of October 21: “British Unit Prepares to Defy Extremes of the Afghan Winter / Crack Troops Will Have to Work in Temperatures as Low as -20C.”
Big deal. Crack columnist has to work in temperatures as low as -16C. And for my neck of the woods, this is a very mild winter.
Now pedants will point out that there are one or two brisk parts of the Hindu Kush. On top of Mount Sikaram, at 15,620 feet the highest elevation in Afghanistan’s White Mountains, it would no doubt freeze the proverbial knackers off a brass monkey. Similarly, on top of Mount Washington, highest elevation in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, it’s -15 with the wind chill, while down in the state capital of Concord it’s a balmy 36. That’s why no one except a couple of meteorologist types lives on top of Mount Washington, but thousands do down in Concord. Amazingly, despite the vast
cultural differences, the same patterns of population dispersal prevail in Afghanistan. Up on Mount Sikaram, a convenient eight-day donkey-ride to the nearest 7-Eleven, the only guys interested in buying a ski condo are Osama and Mullah Omar. Al-Qaeda operatives aside, the overwhelming majority of the Afghan population live in towns currently enjoying temperatures most Canadians won’t see for another three or four months.
So where did this “brutal Afghan winter” business come from? It came, pre-eminently, from spokespersons for the relief agencies. There are some special-interest groups—the National Rifle Association, Right to Life—whose press releases get dismissed by the media as propaganda, and others—environmental groups, for example—whose every claim is taken at face value. Into this last happy category fall the “humanitarian lobby.” Throughout the rhetorically brutal autumn, they bombarded us:
Predicting even more desperate times for millions of Afghans, international relief groups and federal humanitarian aid officials are scrambling to get food and medical supplies into a country they say is on the verge of famine. . . . They expect the conditions to deteriorate rapidly as the brutal winter sets in.
Gosh.
The UN Children’s Fund estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger within weeks if vital aid did not reach them.
Oh, my.
The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating rapidly, international aid agencies say, and they are predicting the worst humanitarian crisis ever.
The aid agencies, you’ll recall, campaigned aggressively for a “bombing pause” during Ramadan. This would have enabled them to truck some food convoys through the mountains from Pakistan. These routes get snowbound and become impassable, and that’s really the only salient fact about the “brutal Afghan winter.”
Why are the roads to Pakistan more important than the roads to Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan? Because Pakistan, being Afghanistan’s most westernized neighbor, is where the western aid agencies are based. These are the fellows like my old chum from
The Independent
in London, Alex Renton. Alex, the son of former Tory minister Lord Renton, is now an Oxfam big shot in the region. A lot of the other humanitarian coves running around out there are also English boarding-school boys, chaps with names like Rupert and Sebastian on a benign version of the journey of self-discovery that that Taliban guy from Marin County went on. I’m sure they’re all very well-intentioned, but when they start shrieking about the fast approaching brutal Afghan winter and the imminent deaths of millions, what they’re mainly doing is protesting that the American military action is disrupting their act.
Here’s how you feed Afghanistan: You can get Rupert and Sebastian to load up the trucks in Peshawar and drive through to Kabul, where what isn’t stolen by the Taliban can be distributed to the people. Or you can bomb the Taliban, drive them from office, put a non-deranged administration in place, re-open the year-round road-and-rail bridge to Uzbekistan, speed up construction on a second Uzbek bridge, and get air convoys to cover the places roads can’t reach. In the seven weeks since the fall of Kabul, all this has happened. The millions who are supposed to be dying aren’t. The hundred thousand child corpses are alive and kicking. The UN says all the supplies it needs to feed Afghanistan are now getting through.
Here’s what would have happened had the aid agencies got their way and pressured the U.S. into a bombing pause: many more Afghans would have starved to death, the Taliban would have been secured in power at least for another few months and perhaps indefinitely, but Rupert and Sebastian would
have enjoyed the stage-heroic frisson of bouncing along in the truck to Jalalabad. That seems a high price for the Afghan people to pay. One expects a certain amount of reflexive anti-Americanism from these “humanitarian” types, but in the brutal Afghan fall they went too far: they ought at least to be big enough to admit they were wrong and be grateful the Pentagon ignored their bleatings.