... The Clintons are in New Zealand and finally get to meet "Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea’s mother had been named for."

Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and an unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. I mentioned this in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph eight years ago this very week, after this little story was trotted out the first time, but like so many curious anomalies in the Clinton record, it somehow cruises on indestructibly. By the time Sir Edmund shuffles off this mortal coil, the New York Times headline will read: "Man for Whom President Rodham Named Dies; Climbed Everest in 1947"...

Is there anything interesting in "My Life" by Bill Clinton? Oh, yes. Page 870... The foothills of the vast tome are deceptively easy, when Mr. Clinton is merely telling a heartwarming personal anecdote about every single person listed in the Arkansas telephone directory between 1946 and 1992. But in the higher elevations after page 700, it’s heavier going: Up in the clouds, way above the out-of-his-tree line, the president advances the theory that he was obliged to submit to random sexual advances in order to uphold the important constitutional principle that Republicans are uptight about oral sex. I think I’ve got that right, but by then I was finding it hard to breathe and beginning to see double...

The clue to where he goes wrong comes in the prologue. "No person I know ever had more or better friends," he writes, "the now legendary FOBs[Friends of Bill]." Granted that a remarkable number of those FOBs wound up dead, in jail or drowning in legal bills, there are still thousands out there, and Bill feels he has to mention them all... Monica? The president appears to have accidentally modified his story and started his relationship with the comely intern several months earlier than he testified to at the time: "During the government shutdown in late 1995," he writes, "I’d had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions." Truly, that is one of the saddest sentences ever written.
OUCH! Now, that’s painful.
Now, I understand that there are those who think Monica, Paula, Gennifer, et al., are peripheral distractions from the Clinton story--that it was one of the most consequential presidencies of the past several millennia and resulted in a lot of landmark legislation such as, um, that federal regulation restricting the size of your toilet cistern. Important stuff you wouldn’t get from the likes of James Buchanan or Chester Arthur. Mr. Clinton is certainly thinking of his legacy. The index lists more pages for "bin Laden, Osama" than "Jones, Paula," which isn’t how it seemed at the time. You can’t blame the poor fellow. As things stand, you’d be hard put to devise a more apt personal embodiment of the long holiday from history the U.S. took between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center. If geopolitics is the Super Bowl, Mr. Clinton is Janet Jackson, complete with wardrobe malfunctions.
You go, Mark! Pile it on. :-p
Instead, Mr. Clinton’s book is a double flop: Either stake your claim to join the guys on Mount Rushmore or embrace your destiny as a guy who rushes to mount more.
Jeebus Cripes on a Crutch! Mark’s on a roll here.
In the old days, Bill Clinton carried off his peculiar psychoses with dash and élan. They were stirring times: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your country can do for me." (I quote from memory.)

Things are not as they appear in the Middle East, for while on the surface things may look pretty bad, underneath they are much worse. And what looks so bad is really the one thing that is going right.

Two nasty car bombings on successive days, a couple of high-level assassinations, and numerous small sniping and other terrorist incidents, on top of unresolved constitutional squabbling between Kurds and Shia, and intra-Shia, and legal chaos surrounding the handover of Saddam Hussein and several thousand other key prisoners still in U.S. custody, have left the Western and Arab media under the impression that the turnover of power to the new Iraqi government is somehow not going smoothly.

Yet all these hits and complications are easily survivable, for the new Iraqi state. They are just the background noise one must increasingly expect wherever Muslim "militants" are confronted with the possibility of an open society. The crescendo is building towards June 30th -- the formal date of transfer from Paul Bremer’s administration to that of Prime Minister Iyad Illawi -- after which the Iraqi music will begin to fade.

Less attention is given to the more worrying, longer-term development. In the vicinity of Basra -- which has been remarkably quiet despite the best efforts of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shia blackshirts to stir up trouble -- two clever acts of sabotage have succeeded in cutting off most of Iraq’s oil exports, for a couple of weeks. The saboteurs were most likely members of cells controlled by the Wahabi Islamist underground in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

The main terminal complex in Basra and a smaller one at Khor al-Amaya nearby had been loading 2.5 million barrels per day, a significant portion of the world’s oil supply, and most of the new Iraq’s income. The pipeline through Syria is down by policy, and that through the Kurdish north and Turkey (with a capacity well under 1 million barrels per day) has been cut to a trickle by frequent small terrorist hits.

The problem here is that oil pipelines and facilities have become targets of choice. They were always fairly easy to hit, but as Arab psychopaths from Osama bin Laden down used to argue publicly, they must not be hit because they are the unique source of Arab wealth, power, and prestige. To stop the flow of oil is to cut: 1. the ability of the "Arab nation" to hold the industrialized nations hostage; 2. their ability to fund the terror networks, and the parallel networks of Wahabi madrasas, mosques, charities, and political fronts that proselytize for radical Islam across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Worse (from an Al Qaeda point of view), the destruction of the oil weapon would mean, ultimately, 3. the loss of the Arab ability to shape, direct, and define Islam for non-Arab Muslims in our post-modern world.

Desperate times require desperate measures, however -- the Islamist "militants" have been, since 9/11, losing materially on almost every front -- and it is becoming clear that the leaders have been rethinking their approach. It becomes very clear, when one looks into Saudi Arabia, and finds a purposeful strategy to "drive out the infidels" by assassinating carefully selected Western technologists upon whom continuous Saudi oil production most depends.

For two months now, the U.S. State Department, working on the premise that people’s lives are more important than people’s money, have been advising American nationals to get out of Saudi Arabia, in response to the terrorist campaign. They are in fact leaving, faster and faster. While the House of Saud can still contrive to pump oil at something like the present volume for a few months using Saudi nationals and the less skilled foreign workers not yet targeted, the oil infrastructure will then collapse. It depends entirely on American, Japanese, and European expertise.

This makes the possibility of a world oil crisis on a scale beyond anything experienced in 1974 or 1979 entirely thinkable in the coming winter. It explains why the U.S., Japan, Germany and other leading oil-dependent countries have been building inventories at an unprecedented rate, even at high current oil prices.

There is another regional issue of some urgency: that Iran’s ayatollahs are on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. That is very serious, and almost nothing is being done about it, in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. Call that potential Armageddon No. 1.

But Armageddon No. 2 must also be considered: fanatical Arabs having decided, on behalf of all their brethren, that they must try to turn the world’s oil supply into one big suicide bomb.

We have nothing against the American people, I am often told, it’s only their leaders and their policies we disapprove of. Oh, I understand. Thanks for clearing that up. Thus, recently, one of Europe’s foreign ministers denounced America’s president as the “chief culprit of this war” and went on to bemoan the “American people” for having been betrayed by such an irresponsible leader. Evoking America’s “historically unique and shameless ill treatment of truth and of right” as well as "a country where everything is built on the dollar", a European head of state added that the “so-called” president was “guilty of a series of the worst crimes against international law”and that "first, he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy, and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack." But a question arises. Who were the courageous politicians making those stirring statements?

Jacques Chirac? Villepin? Zapatero? Schröder? Fischer?

No.

And which U.S. president were they speaking of? Dubya?

No.

Bush’s dad?

No.

Ronald Reagan?

No.

And where did I get those stirring words from? Le Monde? France 3? El País? The BBC? Stern? Der Spiegel?

Non, non, no, no, nein, nein.

Enough guesswork.

Here are your answers


Here is the American president who is at the head of a decayed country and who is the chief culprit of the war.

Here is the foreign minister quoted at the top.

Here is the journalist and the source of the above information.

Here is the head of state.

As you can see, it turns out that Europe has a long tradition of producing citizens, societies, and leaders who make no bones about giving lessons to the Yankees, which is hardly surprising, given the track record those Europeans sport in showing their humanism, their lucidity, their generosity, their love of mankind, their respect for international law, and their unwavering desire for peace.

In early May, Niall Ferguson, the celebrity Scottish historian, looked out at a packed house seething with antagonism. He had come to Washington to deliver a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations defending his idea that the war in Iraq had not only been the right thing to do, but also ought to be the first step towards a wide-ranging American empire. It would be difficult to imagine a moment when the capital's bipartisan policy elite --Ferguson's audience--were less inclined to be receptive to his ideas. The first accounts of the torture at Abu Ghraib had just appeared, and the cause in Iraq was beginning to look more hopeless than ever. And the crowd had come to see someone answer for all of this, to see how Ferguson, whose ideas had help get us into the war, would defend himself. Ferguson didn't defend himself. He attacked.

Within three minutes, he'd lost the liberals in the crowd, arguing, improbably that the problems in Iraq proved that America ought to be more of an empire, not less of one. A bald-headed scholar from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace asked him whether the United States ought to be morally willing to slay thousands of Iraqis to stabilize Iraq. Ferguson retorted, "Perhaps you would wish Saddam back in power; that's the implication of what you're saying." The liberal think-tankers around me started guffawing openly, and shooting each other is-this-guy-for-real smirks.

With one leg crossed over the other, his hands folded in his lap, his pale face issuing a dispassionate monotone, Ferguson pressed on. Not only were the problems in Iraq the direct fault of America's unwillingness to call itself an empire, he said, but they were also predictable. "In behaving the way they did," Ferguson said, "those soldiers and military policemen [at Abu Ghraib] were largely doing to their prisoners what routinely people in the American military do to new recruits."

This was too much for even the conservatives in the audience. The guffaws grew louder, the muttered protests reached the front of the room. In the row in front of me, a broad-shouldered, uniformed officer stood up. "Big disagree here, sir," he bellowed. "Big disagree with your characterization." (Fleetingly, I wondered if this was how colonels address one another in private). "The institution I have spent my life in abhors what went on in Iraq," he said. "It's not the way we treat anyone-- a fresh recruit or a plebe at West Point." The crowd clapped vigorously. In less than 10 minutes, Ferguson had pulled off that rarest of Washington double plays, alienating liberals and conservatives alike.