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Peace at any cost is a prelude to war!
WALL STREET JOURNAL
APRIL 24, 2000 - PEGGY NOONAN
Why Did They Do It?
by Peggy Noonan
>From the beginning it was a story marked by the miraculous. It was a
miracle a six-year-old boy survived the storm at sea and floated safely in
an inner tube for two days and nights toward shore; a miracle that when
he tired and began to slip, the dolphins who surrounded him like a
contingent of angels pushed him upward; a miracle that a fisherman saw
him bobbing in the shark-infested waters and scooped him aboard on the
morning of Nov. 25, 1999, the day celebrated in America, the country his
mother died bringing him to, as Thanksgiving.
And of course this Saturday, in the darkness, came the nightmare: the
battering ram, the gas, the masks, the guns, the threats, the shattered
glass and smashed statue of the Blessed Mother, the blanket thrown
over the sobbing child's head as they tore him from the house like a
hostage. And the last one in the house to hold him, trying desperately to
protect him, was the fisherman who'd saved him from the sea -- which
seemed fitting as it was Eastertide, the time that marks the sacrifice and
resurrection of the Big Fisherman.
It is interesting that this White House, which feared moving on Iraq during
Ramadan, had no fear of moving on Americans during the holiest time of
the Christian calendar. The mayor of Miami, Joe Carollo, blurted in
shock, "They are atheists. They don't believe in God." Well, they
certainly don't believe the fact that it was Easter was prohibitive of the
use of force; they thought it a practical time to move. The quaint
Catholics of Little Havana would be lulled into a feeling of safety; most of
the country would be distracted by family get-togethers and feasts. It
was, to the Clinton administration, a sensible time to break down doors.
Which really, once again, tells you a lot about who they are. But then
their actions always have a saving obviousness: From Waco to the FBI
files to the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory during impeachment to
taking money from Chinese agents, through every scandal and
corruption, they always tell you who they are by what they do. It's almost
honest.
All weekend you could hear the calls to radio stations, to television, from
commentators, from the 40% who are wounded, grieving and alive to the
implications of what this act tells us about what is allowed in our country
now. "This couldn't happen in America," they say, and "This isn't the
America we know."
This is the America of Bill Clinton's cynicism and cowardice, and Janet
Reno's desperate confusion about right and wrong, as she continues in
her great schmaltzy dither to prove how sensitive she is, how concerned
for the best interests of the child, as she sends in armed troops who
point guns at the child sobbing in the closet. So removed from reality is
she that she claims the famous picture of the agent pointing the gun at
the fisherman and the child did not in fact show that.
The great unanswered question of course is: What was driving Mr.
Clinton? What made him do such a thing? What accounts for his
commitment in this case? Concern for the father? But such concern is
wholly out of character for this president; he showed no such concern for
parents at Waco or when he freed the Puerto Rican terrorists. Concern
for his vision of the rule of law? But Mr. Clinton views the law as a thing
to suit his purposes or a thing to get around.
Why did he do this thing? He will no doubt never say, a pliant press will
never push him on it, and in any case if they did who would expect him
to speak with candor and honesty? Absent the knowledge of what
happened in this great public policy question, the mind inevitably
wonders.
Was it fear of Fidel Castro -- fear that the dictator will unleash another
flood of refugees, like the Mariel boatlift of 1980? Mr. Clinton would take
that seriously, because he lost his gubernatorial election that year after
he agreed to house some of the Cubans. In Bill Clinton's universe
anything that ever hurt Bill Clinton is bad, and must not be repeated. But
such a threat, if it was made, is not a child custody matter but a national
security matter, and should be dealt with in national security terms.
Was it another threat from Havana? Was it normalization with Cuba --
Mr. Clinton's lust for a legacy, and Mr. Castro's insistence that the gift
come at a price? If the price was a child, well, that's a price Mr. Clinton
would likely pay. What is a mere child compared with this president's
need to be considered important by history?
Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the
president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there
was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence
service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the
blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro's intelligence
service, or that of a Castro friend.
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and
searing tragedy has occurred, and none of us knows what drove it, or
why the president did what he did. Maybe Congress will investigate.
Maybe a few years from now we'll find out what really happened.
For now we're left with the famous photo, the picture of the agent pointing
his gun at the sobbing child and fisherman, the one that is already as
famous as the picture taken 30 Easters ago, during another tragedy, as
a student cried over the prone body of a dead fellow student at Kent
State. It is an inconvenient photo for the administration. One wonders if it
will be reproduced, or forced down the memory hole.
We are left with Elian's courageous cousin, Marisleysis, who Easter
morning told truth to power, an American citizen speaking to the nation
about the actions of the American government. We are left with the
hoarse-voiced fisherman, who continues trying to save the child. We are
left wondering if there was a single federal law-enforcement official who,
ordered to go in and put guns at the heads of children, said no. Was
there a single agent or policeman who said, "I can't be part of this"? Are
they all just following orders?
We are left wondering if Mr. Clinton will, once again, get what he seems
to want. Having failed to become FDR over health care, or anything else
for that matter, he will now "be" JFK, finishing the business of 1961 and
the missile crisis. Maybe he will make a speech in Havana. One can
imagine Strobe Talbot taking Walter Isaacson aside, and Time magazine
reporting the words of a high State Department source: "In an odd way
Elian helped us -- the intensity of the experience, the talks and
negotiations, were the most intense byplay our two countries have had
since JFK. The trauma brought us together."
And some of us, in our sadness, wonder what Ronald Reagan, our last
great president, would have done. I think I know. The burden of proof
would have been on the communists, not the Americans; he would have
sent someone he trusted to the family and found out the facts; seeing
the boy had bonded with the cousin he would have negotiated with Mr.
Castro to get the father here, and given him whatever he could that would
not harm our country.
Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as
Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable
assumption that God's creatures had been commanded to protect one of
God's children. And most important, the idea that he would fear Mr.
Castro, that he would be afraid of a tired old tyrant in faded fatigues,
would actually have made him laugh. Mr. Reagan would fear only what
kind of country we would be if we took the little boy and threw him over
the side, into the rough sea of history.
He would have made a statement laying out the facts and ended it, "The
boy stays, the dream endures, the American story continues. And if Mr.
Castro doesn't like it, well, I'm afraid that's really too bad."
But then he was a man.
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