Saturday, June 14, 2003 :::
Happy Flag Day.
I've been catching up with Mark Steyn on Israel:
According to a poll last month, 98 per cent of people in the Palestinian Authority and 99 per cent in Jordan have a "somewhat or very unfavourable opinion of the United States". I took this personally. I went pretty much all over Jordan and I thought, like Sally Field, they liked me, they really liked me. True, I'm not American. But, whenever I had to show my Canadian passport, the official would peer at the coat of arms and beam, "Ah, American. Welcome, welcome." The one exception was a customs officer who knew what he was dealing with. "Canada?" he said. "You have Sars?"
But other than that, I was assumed to be American and everywhere from the capital to the most broken-down village was treated with frankly excessive deference. And now it turns out 99 per cent of them were faking it: they don't like me, they really don't like me. My first reaction was disappointment. My second was: who cares? They can hate and despise me all they want, as long as they keep it to themselves.
pretty much summing up the spirit of liberty. Steyn also had a piece last weekend on the British on Iraq:
In Kirkuk the other day, they found another mass grave, this time with the bodies of 200 children who had been buried alive. Yawn. Doesn't count. Wake me if they find a toxic warhead among the teeny skulls. The naysayers were wrong on so much - millions of refugees, Vietnam quagmire, Stalingrad, etc - you can't blame them for clinging to the one little straw that hasn't shrivelled up and slipped between their fingers: Come on, Tony, where's the WMD?
Or as [leader of the Opposition] Iain Duncan Smith put it in the House of Commons: "The truth is nobody believes a word you say now." Well, I do. Because what Mr Blair said is not only in line with what American officials told me, it is in line with what Continental officials told me - as recently as two weeks ago, when a big-time Euro paused midway through his harangue about the illegality of the war to assure me that "of course" Saddam had been up to WMD monkey business.
That the Tories oppose Blair on this is a clear example, I think, of an opposition party taking a particular position on an issue solely because it's the opposite of the position that the party in power has taken.
::: posted by Steven at 10:24 PM
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