Washington — I think those of us who specialize in observing
political movements among the American elites have all noticed a
pell-mell stampede towards the peace movement in the last few days.
Only this peace movement is not propelled by international
solidarity with the workers of the world or the wretched of the
earth. That was what propelled the peace movements of the 1970s and
1980s, back when it had such benign figures as Leonid Brezhnev,
Yuri Andropov, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh to protect. Today’s
peace movement is protecting President Saddam Hussein. What has he
ever done for the workers of the world or the wretched of the
earth? The closest things he has to the wretched of the earth are
various ethnic and religious minorities living uncomfortably in
Iraq. What he has done for them is pelt them with weapons of mass
destruction and torture some of the survivors.
Now the Bush Administration in alliance with a dozen or so
European countries wants to protect the world from Saddam’s weapons
and force him to honor his agreements with the United Nations. For
their exertions they are being denounced by peace demonstrators as
though they were mindless anti-Communists, as foolhardy and
dangerous to world peace as a Ronald Reagan. Out come the old
slogans. “Give Peace A Chance.” “Make Love Not War (Use
Condoms).”
But wait! Do the peace demonstrators really believe that Saddam
is, in terms of simple decency, the equal, say, of Brezhnev? And
are they even sure that Brezhnev was such a great guy? Is it
possible that peace was attained at the end of the 1980s not by
marches in the street but by the weight of military pressure
against an improvident economic system, Communism? I think so and
in a Wall Street Journal column
this week, Robert Bartley, the man who edited the Journal
during the Cold War, reminds us that the biological and chemical
weapons used by Saddam may have their provenance in the
laboratories of Papa Brezhnev.
For nearly two decades the Journal reported the growing
menace of chemical and biological warfare. Its reports were not
greatly appreciated by members of the peace movement. As they
perceived the Journal’s reporting, it was mere
provocation. Yet what was the Journal trying to provoke?
That is a good question. Presumably the editors sought world war or
at least to sell more newspapers to those who sought world war.
Actually the paper was only seeking to inform the public of the
dangerous research going on in the Soviet Union and of the danger
of entering into chemical and biological arms control agreements
with people so obviously disposed to break such agreements.
Bartley in his column this week reminds us of the lengths to
which his opponents went to refute the Journal’s evidence
that the Soviet Union was developing chemical and biological
weaponry of the sort that Saddam has right now and that Saddam
actually used against his Kurds in 1988 and against Iranians during
his spectacular bloodbath in the Iraq-Iran War. Noting that as
early as 1975 Hmong tribesman fighting the Communists in Laos
reported being sprayed by a deadly “Yellow Rain” from aerial
assaults, the Journal amassed evidence that the “rain”
contained trichothecene mycotoxins, poisons probably concocted by
Russian scientists in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons
Convention.
The advocates of the peace movement and of 1970s arms control
agreements settled on an explanation that the yellow rain was
honeybee feces. One of their scientific leaders, Harvard’s Dr.
Matthew Meselson, actually journeyed to Thailand where he found
honeybee feces that looked very much like the yellow rain in Laos.
That set the world peace movement to laughing it up at the expense
of the Journal. There was only one difference between Dr.
Meselson’s manure and the yellow rain of Laos. His manure had no
trichothecene mycotoxins.
The members of the peace movement and their birds of a feather
at the United Nations are again demonstrating what such
soi-disant moderates have demonstrated so often in times
of international danger, to wit, the moral superiority of
procrastination. And among the irenic Hollywoodians we see the
moral superiority of publicity seeking. Yet in the end it is not
the morally superior who vanquish dictators but lesser figures such
as Ronald Reagan and those forgotten journalists who explicated the
Soviet biological and chemical warfare programs in the 1970s at the
Wall Street Journal. Defectors have now emerged from
Russia claiming that the programs employed as many as 25,000
people. Many are still around and in need of work.
