At 07:56 PM 05/04/2003 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
On Sat, 3 May 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:
Not at all: this is to be expected after the three minute hate...
Oh, right, who's today's target? Are we still practicing hating Saddam, or is it Bashar al-Assad this week, or the French?
I kind of wonder whatever happened to Quaddafi? Did he learn to love Big Brother? Or did he have an accidental demide while I was not looking?
He's been relatively quiet for a few years; I'm not sure if we're saving him for later (unlikely; North Korea's really lots more fun, and strategically important because otherwise there'd be lots of good reasons for getting the US military out of South Korea and the rest of that corner of the Pacific, but now we can't do that because there's a convenient nu-cu-lur madman around.) As it was, I was spell-checking Hafez al-Assad when Google reminded me that he'd died a couple years ago from cancer, and his kid Bashar had taken over. Bashar's smarter brother Bassel had been supposed to succeed him, but had a suspicious "car accident" in the mid 90s. Syria still has a Baath Socialist Party, as Iraq did, but it's not clear whether there's really a strong enough relationship to worry about, and while America Has Always Been At War With Hafez al-Assad, and Krauthammer thinks we should be at war with Bashar, there's a lot of opinion that maybe he'll fail to be a credible enough target for the warmongers to really pull off an invasion of convenience.