Bloodthirsty Liberal

You may have your Barack Obama, but my Barack Obama exposes the most explosive region in the world to the spark of chaos:

He da man!

A military site containing what appears to be radioactive material has been uncovered by revolutionary forces near the southern Libyan city of Sabha.

Military forces loyal to the country’s National Transitional Council took a CNN crew Thursday to the site, not far from Sabha in the Sahara desert. The crew saw two large warehouses there, one containing thousands of blue barrels, some marked with tape saying “radioactive,” and several plastic bags of yellow powder sealed with the same tape.

The material has not been confirmed as being radioactive, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, confirmed Thursday that the Libyan government had yellowcake stored near Sabha.

Hey, maybe this is good news. Maybe we got it all, and the Islamists among the Libyan militants didn’t grab a few barrels of the stuff for use against certain elements not to their liking.

Maybe.

PS: The real reason I linked to this story is because of the name of the blog where I found it:

Challah Hu Akbar—brilliant!

In all the [bleep] talked by Egyptians—and we’ve processed a lot of it—there’s an occasional nugget in all the dross:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian General (ret.) Abd Al-Hamid Umran, which aired on ON TV on August 21, 2011:

[N]ow that we have become more powerful – and we all hope to become even stronger – we have the right to demand that this treaty [the Camp David Accords] be changed, in accordance with our interests. Similarly, it is in their interest not to take this too far, because this might drive us in another direction. I would like to reiterate, and this may be the 20th time I say this: There can be no Egyptian national security without an Egyptian nuclear program. Full stop.

[…]

This will restore the balance of power. Forget about all those minor battles, forget about the occupation, forget about the five people killed, may they rest in peace. All this stems from our lack of strategic power, which would counterbalance the strategic power of Israel. This begins with a nuclear program for peaceful purposes. It could require 5-10 years, whatever it takes, but eventually, we will have enriched uranium. Obviously, enriched uranium requires many ploys and tricks. They tell you that it is okay to enrich to 3%, but not to 5%. This way we will have the 3%, and then we can leave…

Interviewer: We can play the Iranian game…

Abd Al-Hamid Umran: Exactly. That’s what Iran is doing.

Now, that’s what I think. That’s what everyone not duped, intentionally or not, by Iran thinks. But I wonder why a retired Egyptian general thinks the UN has been duped, intentionally or not, by Iran. You don’t suppose he’s been talking to the UN’s chief investigator, the Egyptian Mohammed el-Baradei, do you? Course not.

Interviewer: The international inspectors will be oblivious to all this? Will this ploy work on the international inspectors?

Abd Al-Hamid Umran: You should look at the details. When the inspectors go to Iran, they stand in front of the centrifuge cascades, behind a chain barrier that the Iranians placed there. The Iranians say to them: “This is the output of that cascade.” When the inspectors say that they want to go in and see the actual connections, the Iranians don’t let them.

On the other hand…

Not of Iran. A couple of well-placed JDAMs and bunker-busters (or even a nasty computer virus) will put them in their place.

Be afraid of your government:

Mounting evidence over the last few years has convinced most experts that Iran has an active program to develop and construct nuclear weapons. Amazingly, however, these experts do not include the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community. They are unwilling to conduct a proper assessment of the Iranian nuclear issue—and so they remain at variance with the Obama White House, U.S. allies, and even the United Nations.

The last month alone has brought several alarming developments concerning Tehran’s nuclear program. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano said last month that his agency has new information pointing to the military ambitions of Iran’s nuclear program. As of today, Iran has over 4,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium—enough, according to the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, for four nuclear weapons if enriched to weapons grade.

Iran has accelerated its production of low-enriched uranium in defiance of U.N. and IAEA resolutions. It has also announced plans to install advanced centrifuge machines in a facility built deep inside a mountain near the city of Qom. According to several U.S. diplomats and experts, the facility is too small to be part of a peaceful nuclear program and appears specially constructed to enrich uranium to weapons grade.

To top this off, an item recently posted to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps website mused about the day after an Iranian nuclear test (saying, in a kind of taunt, that it would be a “normal day”). That message marked the first time any official Iranian comment suggested the country’s nuclear program is not entirely peaceful.

Despite all this, U.S. intelligence officials are standing by their assessment, first made in 2007, that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and has not restarted it since.

What kind of person doesn’t believe Iran is building nuclear weapons?

I have been permitted to say the following about the outside reviewers: Two of the four are former CIA analysts who work for the same liberal Washington, D.C., think tank. Neither served under cover, and their former CIA employment is well known. Another reviewer is a liberal university professor and strong critic of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. The fourth is a former senior intelligence official. Not surprisingly, the 2011 NIE included short laudatory excerpts from these reviewers that offered only very mild criticism.

It is unacceptable that Iran is on the brink of testing a nuclear weapon while our intelligence analysts continue to deny that an Iranian nuclear weapons program exists. One can’t underestimate the dangers posed to our country by a U.S. intelligence community that is unable to provide timely and objective analysis of such major threats to U.S. national security—or to make appropriate adjustments when it is proven wrong.

If U.S. intelligence agencies cannot or will not get this one right, what else are they missing?

Here’s hoping we live long enough to find out. I’m not holding my breath.

PS: Maybe there is a learning curve, however:

A senior Iranian legislator confirmed earlier reports saying that a US drone has been shot down by Iran over Fordo nuclear enrichment plant in the Central Qom province.

Member of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Ali Aqazadeh Dafsari said on Tuesday that the unmanned spy plane was flying near the Fordo nuclear enrichment plant in Qom province when the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)’s Air Defense units brought it down.

The official stated that the US drone was on a mission to identify the location of the Fordo nuclear enrichment plant and gather information about the nuclear facility for the CIA, Dafsari stated.

Remember back in 2007, when Israel bombed the Syrian nuclear plant? Remember how the usual suspects claimed it wasn’t a nuclear plant at all, that this was more proof of Israeli aggression?

Yeah, well, the UN has now owned up to reality. But they are more focused on other stuff.

The UN nuclear watchdog brought allegations of covert atomic work by Syria before the Security Council on Thursday, but the 15-nation body took no immediate action amid divisions among key powers.

The International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors voted in June to report Syria to the council, rebuking it for stonewalling an agency probe into the Dair Alzour complex, bombed by Israel in 2007.

Western countries said Thursday’s closed-door briefing by Neville Whiting, head of the IAEA safeguards department dealing with Syria and Iran, had made clear that Syria had a secret nuclear plant. They said the council should pursue the issue, but suggested it might not discuss it again before September.

Russia and China, allies of Damascus who can veto any council action, queried whether the council should be involved, as the Syrian complex no longer exists.

US intelligence reports have said the complex was a nascent, North Korean-designed reactor intended to produce plutonium for atomic weaponry, before Israeli warplanes reduced it to rubble. Syria has said it was a non-nuclear military facility.

British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant told reporters Whiting had given a “devastating briefing … from which you could only draw one conclusion — that Syria did have at Dair Alzour a clandestine nuclear plant.”

Damascus had “tried to conceal the purpose of that plant … misled the IAEA about what the purpose was and … failed to cooperate effectively with the IAEA in following up the questions that the IAEA put to them,” he said.

IAEA to produce new report in September

Both Lyall Grant and German Ambassador Peter Wittig noted that the IAEA was due to produce a new report on Syria for its board of governors in September. “And then we take it from there,” Wittig said.

Take it from there, eh? Where would they be taking it? I know! Out for hamburgers, fries, milkshake and a diet coke.

- Aggie

You can’t be that clean and articulate, with a pant that well-creased, wielding such a first-rate temperament, without seeing reason.

The Obama administration calls the United Nations worthless… in so many words:

The U.S. won’t follow Canada’s lead in boycotting a United Nations arms control conference chaired by North Korea, even though the State Department concedes the rogue regime has flouted its own disarmament obligations to the Security Council and the international community.

“We have chosen not to make a big deal out of this because it’s a relatively low-level, inconsequential event,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

You say low-level and inconsequential, I say caked with scum. Same difference.

But what’s this about Canada?

Earlier in the day, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird called North Korea’s chairmanship at the Geneva-based U.N. Conference on Disarmament “absurd” and a “huge blow to the credibility of the United Nations.”

“It’s important that Canada take a stand,” Baird said during a press conference. “North Korea is simply not a credible chair of a major non proliferation conference. It undermines the integrity of both the disarmament framework and the United Nations.”

“We are no longer going to go along to get along,” he added. Canada will not rejoin the discussion until North Korea leaves the seat on Aug. 19. It assumed leadership on June 28.

Chill, man! Eh? No one’s arguing with you. But you lost me at “credibility of the United Nations”. And “integrity”? Have a Molson and relax.

Pay attention to how Obama leads from behind. He’s like Bobby Orr, to put it in terms you’d understand, bringing the puck across the blue line, weaving through defenders, and putting a shot unerringly on goal. In creased hockey pants.

The international organization for peace that appointed a criminal, genocidal, berserk tyrant to an arms control panel?

Stop me if you’ve heard this before:

On Tuesday, the United Nations again made itself an international laughing stock – except perhaps to the American taxpayers who continue to foot 22 percent of the bill – by appointing North Korea chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. That would be the same North Korea that, according to an article this week by Senator John Kerry, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has “twice tested nuclear weapons…is developing missiles to carry them…has built facilities capable of producing highly enriched uranium for more nuclear weapons” and has defied a U.N. arms embargo by exporting weapons and sensitive technologies to rogue regimes.

…

North Korea’s chairmanship was heralded by other U.N. aficionados, including the Iranian delegate to the Conference. Iran’s Mohammad Hassan Daryaei told the Conference meeting: “I would like to congratulate the distinguished ambassador of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the assumption of the presidency and assuring him of my delegation’s full support and cooperation.”

Iran’s support is telling. Just yesterday Iran’s Revolutionary Guards tested 14 long-range missiles that could carry a nuclear weapon, with the express purpose of hitting U.S. interests and Israel, according to the head of their aerospace division.

Congratulations also poured in from such upstanding world citizens and U.N. fans as China. China’s Wang Qun “welcomed the presidency of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

As you know, this is just another story, however appalling, in a long series of like stories. But just like the Unexpected™ stories can’t really be said to be unexpected, how can the routine be appalling? After Iran, China, and Cuba (among illustrious other) have served on the Human Rights panel, after Saudi Arabia was considered very seriously for a women’s rights panel, after UN peacekeepers have stood aside while rapes were taking place—indeed have been complicit in rape and child abuse themselves—this story isn’t appalling, but as easy to predict as ABC:

North Korea assumes the Conference chairmanship by being the next state in the alphabetical rotation of the 65 members…

I do wonder sometimes if it’s just me. Maybe I’m oversensitive. After all, back in my liberal days, I used to hope that the UN was the last best hope for world peace. (I don’t suppose anything in my past shames me more than that.)

At least there was one sane person left to turn out the light:

Canada’s Marius Grinius said: “[I]n the last 13 years the Conference has failed to move forward on its core disarmament responsibilities, including the negotiation of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty…[T]he Conference on Disarmament is on life support because it no longer is the sole multilateral negotiating forum for disarmament. Indeed, it is not negotiating anything and has not been for a very long time.”

Five years later, they get around to whispering the truth.

VIENNA – A Syrian site bombed by Israel in 2007 was “very likely” to have been a nuclear reactor which should have been declared, the UN atomic agency said in a report, an assertion which may lead to Damascus being referred to the UN Security Council.

The confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), obtained by Reuters, threw independent weight behind Western suspicions that Syria was secretly building a reactor at the Dair Alzour site in the desert.

The United States and its European allies may seize on the report’s finding to push for a decision by the IAEA’s 35-nation board, meeting on June 6-10, to report the Syrian nuclear issue to the U.N. Security Council.

Goodness, I’m so surprised. I thought it was a waste treatment plant or something.

- Aggie

If we are to believe the Muslims (and I expect I’ve lost a lot of readers already), Israel has sicced sharks on unsuspecting bathers in Sinai and vultures on the holy and pious of Saudi Arabia.

But it seems they’re just getting started:

Israeli spy agency’s (Mossad) direct involvement in the assassination of elites in the Middle-Eastern countries was recalled after new reports unveiled Mossad’s direct role in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari.

According to a report posted on IranNuc.ir website on Wednesday, the Israeli spy agency has a long record in assassinating Arab and Muslim scientists in collaboration with its US and British counterparts (CIA and MI6).

The report revealed the names of several Arab scientists who were assassinated by Mossad, including Yahiya Amin al-Mashd and Samireh Mousa (Egyptian scientists), Samir Najib, Nabil al-Qolaini, Nabil Ahmad Folayfel, Mostafa Ali Moshrefah (known as the Arab World’s Einstein), Jamal Hamdan, Saeed Sayyed Badir, Salvi Habib, Ramal Hassan Ramal (Lebanese physicist), Hassan Kamel Sabbah (Lebanese physicist known as the Arab World’s Edison).

Global attention was redirected to Mossad’s terror plots for assassinating the nuclear scientists of the Islamic world after Iranian professor Majid Shahriari was killed by the Israeli spy agency in Tehran late in 2010.

Two Iranian university professors Fereidoon Abbasi Davani and Majid Shahriari were assassinated in separate terrorist bomb attacks here in Tehran on November 29 with the latter killed immediately after the blast.

Recent media reports said that Mossad leaders have recently convened in a meeting in a neighborhood North of Tel Aviv and discussed the agency’s latest operations in Tehran, including the assassination of Shahriari.

Another Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, was also assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010.

Also later in December, Iraq’s young nuclear scientist, Mohammad al-Fouz, was gunned down in the country’s capital city of Baghdad by Mossad.

He had released his new uranium enrichment formula in a number of western journals.

Earlier reports had shown Mossad’s involvement in the assassination of more than 350 Iraqi nuclear scientists as well as more than 300 university professors, and the attack on Mohammad al-Fouz was the most recent case in a chain of attacks carried out in recent years.

Now, I’ll admit to being of two minds: bizarre, irrational hatreds like this sort of anti-Semitism are always dangerous; yet it never hurts to have your enemies scared [bleep]less of you.

At the very least, Israel should be flattered that Iran thinks it can rub out 650 nuclear scientists and professors without getting caught. My imagination is scheming to figure out how they did it. Death rays? Untraceable poison? Trained gerbils?

Or maybe they just waited for them to drop dead of AIDS, like Yasser Arafat (allegedly).

Hey Iran, look behind you! Ha, gotcha!

Oh, we just collected a few cans and bottles, and tinkered for a while in the garage:

Last month, U.S. nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker paid his fourth visit to North Korea, where he was granted a tour of some of the hermit kingdom’s nuclear facilities. Think WikiLeaks is bad? Compared to what the former director of the Los Alamos lab saw, it’s nothing.

Mr. Hecker was given a tour of a construction site where Pyongyang intends to build a 100-megawatt reactor. Next he was taken to a uranium enrichment facility. “The first look through the windows of the observation deck into the two long high-bay areas was stunning,” relates Mr. Hecker. “Instead of seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges all neatly aligned and plumbed below us.”

Nor was that all. Mr. Hecker also writes that “The control room was astonishingly modern. Unlike the reprocessing facility and reactor control room, which looked like 1950s U.S. or 1980s Soviet instrumentation, this control room would fit into any modern American processing facility.”

The North Koreans told Mr. Hecker they had developed all of this indigenously. I asked Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, both former nuclear-weapons designers and authors of “The Nuclear Express,” an excellent history of nuclear proliferation, what they thought were the chances of that. Answer: “Zero.”

What does this mean? For starters, it means that Pyongyang’s nuclear efforts are not, or not merely, of the what-else-do-you-expect-from-these-nutcases variety. Some other entity—or regime—has made a considered decision to actively support the North’s efforts to field an ambitious nuclear program.

So who is it?

Before we begin our guessing game, note that this tour was conducted a month ago, and the Koreans saw no reason to conceal the facility. They feel they have nothing and no one to fear. And I fear they’re right.

Now, who could have helped this backward nation, this Biafra with ICBMs, this black hole devoid of hope, with its nuclear ambitions?

Cue the Jeopardy music:

Could it be Iran?

…

What about Pakistan?

…

Which leaves CHINA, the “most likely” provider of the North’s new toys, according to the authors. “There is no possibility,” they say, “of North Korea achieving what nuclear capability it has without Chinese help.”

D’oh! I could have had China, but my gut feeling said Dalmatia. Darn!

It’s time the U.S. drew appropriate conclusions from this. Every effort to negotiate with the North has failed. Yesterday, President Obama called Hu Jintao to ask for help with Pyongyang. But as proliferation expert Henry Sokolski notes, what’s the point of urging Beijing to be part of the solution when it’s so willfully part of the problem? China has signed on to nearly every nonproliferation agreement around. Yet it continues to flout all of them.

This is not the behavior of a status quo power, but of a revolutionary one supporting activities and regimes that represent the most acute threat to global security. If it continues unchecked, it is China that should be sanctioned—and the North’s facilities destroyed.

That last part is composed of both unvarnished truth and ungrounded fantasy.

The truth: “[W]hat’s the point of urging Beijing to be part of the solution when it’s so willfully part of the problem? China has signed on to nearly every nonproliferation agreement around. Yet it continues to flout all of them.”

The fantasy: “If it continues unchecked, it is China that should be sanctioned—and the North’s facilities destroyed.”

You’ve seen how Fearless Leader handles a fat lip. How do you think he’d stand up to a nuclear arsenal?

Way to show an Asian leader your mettle, Bam. Avoid eye contact and bow in obeisance.

Why do I think there’s an Israeli computer scientist somewhere with his hands crossed on the desk in front of him, looking absently at the ceiling, whistling tunelessly?

Or why do I hope so?

Iran’s nuclear agency is trying to combat a complex computer worm that has affected industrial sites throughout the country and is capable of taking over power plants, Iranian media reports said.

Experts from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran met this week to discuss how to remove the malicious computer code, or worm, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported Friday.

The computer worm, dubbed Stuxnet, can take over systems that control the inner workings of industrial plants. Experts in Germany discovered the worm in July, and it has since shown up in a number of attacks — primarily in Iran, Indonesia, India and the U.S.

The ISNA report said the malware had spread throughout Iran, but did not name specific sites affected. Foreign media reports have speculated the worm was aimed at disrupting Iran’s first nuclear power plant, which is to go online in October in the southern port city of Bushehr.

…

The destructive Stuxnet worm has surprised experts because it is the first one specifically created to take over industrial control systems, rather than just steal or manipulate data.

The United States is also tracking the worm, and the Department of Homeland Security is building specialized teams that can respond quickly to cyber emergencies at industrial facilities across the country.

Shame about your computers, Mahmoud. Imagine being that close to building an A-bomb and coming up short. Now you know how Saddam felt.

May you continue to know how he felt, right up to the sharp tug of the rope on your neck.

Caroline Glick admittedly doesn’t have a rosy outlook on the world and its attitude toward Israel. (Why should she?) But this is a bit of a bummer even from her: (Why shouldn’t it be?)

IN THE space of four days, the country has suffered two massive defeats. A straight line runs between the anti-Israel resolution passed last Friday at the UN’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference and the Hamas flotilla. And in both cases, officials voiced “surprise” at these defeats.

Given the months-long build-up to the NPT review conference, and the weeks-long build-up to the Turkish-Hamas flotilla, that surprise cannot be attributed to a lack of information. What it points to, rather, is a cognitive failure of our leaders to understand the nature of the war being waged against us. And it is this fundamental failure of cognition that has landed six soldiers in the hospital, the nation’s international reputation in tatters and its spokesmen searching for a way to describe a reality they do not understand.

The reality is simple and stark. Israel is the target of a massive information war, unprecedented in scale and scope. This war is being waged primarily by a massive consortium of the international Left and the Arab and Islamic worlds. The staggering scale of the forces aligned against us is demonstrated by two things.

The Hamas abetting Free Gaza Web site published a list of some 222 organizations that endorsed the terror-supporting flotilla. The listed organizations from the four corners of the earth include Jewish anti-Israel groups as well as Christian, Islamic and nonreligious anti-Israel groups. It is hard to think of any cause other than Israel-bashing that could unite such disparate forces.

The second indicator of the scope of the war is far more devastating than the list of groups that endorsed the pro-Hamas flotilla. That indicator is the fact that at the UN on Friday, 189 governments came together as one to savage Israel. There is no other issue that commands such unanimity. The NPT review conference demonstrated that the only way the international community will agree on anything is if its members are agreeing that Israel has no right to defend itself. The conference’s campaign against Israel shows that the 222 organizations supporting Hamas are a reflection of the will of the majority of the nations of the world.

This war is nothing new. It has been going on since the dawn of modern Zionism 150 years ago. In many ways, it is just the current iteration of the eternal war against the Jewish people.

There’s a lot more. A lot. But her main point is this:

Israel is the target of a massive information war. For it to win this war, it needs to counter its enemies’ lies with the truth.

The NPT has been subverted by the very forces it was created to prevent from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization ideologically indistinguishable from al-Qaida. International law requires all states and non-state actors to take active measures to defeat it.

Israel is the frontline of the free world. Its ability to defend itself and deter its foes is the single most important guarantee of international peace. A strong Israel is also the most potent and reliable guarantor of the US’s continued ability to project its power in the Middle East.

This is the unvarnished truth.

I’m absolutely serious when I say that President Obama (see, I am being serious) isn’t about the unvarnished truth. He’s about ideology. A commitment to nonproliferation that leads to proliferation, and a commitment to peace that leads to war—these are not the positions of a serious person in pursuit of the truth, but of a howling egomaniac in pursuit of a legacy.

I know better than to read a James Carroll column for sense. But… but… I can’t even tell what he thinks he’s trying to say:

And what was the subject that had brought dozens of world leaders to Washington? Not the mortality of an individual, but of the entire human species. True, the summit focused narrowly on the danger of unsecured nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists. In contrast to a Cold War-era nuclear exchange between the USSR and the US, an al Qaeda nuclear attack, while catastrophic, would not doom civilization. But President Obama’s summit was nevertheless historic because of its deeper meaning. When joined to his just-achieved New Start treaty with Russia, his minor but real adjustments in America’s “nuclear posture’’ (including a renunciation of nuclear attack against non-nuclear states), and his anticipated emphasis on reviving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty next month, the president’s real purpose becomes clear: nuclear weapons must never be accepted as a normal part of the world’s military arsenals. He is pushing back against what one summit participant called “a culture of cynicism,’’ a post-Cold War resignation to nuclear permanence, which, given the dynamics of war-making, amounts to resignation to an ultimate doomsday. The normalization of nuclear weapons (such as that the Bush administration advanced by pursuing a new generation of nukes) would quickly leave the relatively small-scale terrorist threat behind to reignite the danger of civilizational suicide.

Okay, he likes that President Obama held a summit on nuclear weapons. Who doesn’t (except for the global warming alarmists who decry every plane flight as a another spadeful of earth on our graves)?

I could quibble with the position that no nukes or fewer nukes are safer than lots of nukes (no nukes puts us at the level of the other guys with no nukes, and too few nukes leaves us vulnerable, hence more likely to launch first). But I’ll accept the premise, for now, that a world without nuclear weapons would be a better world, if only because a nuclear weapons, unlike most conventional weapons, visit death and deformity to unborn generations and leave a patch of earth uninhabitable for a period of time.

I do wish that Carroll, and the rest of the media, didn’t act like Obama was the first president to make a nuclear pact—hasn’t nearly every president? And if keeping nukes out of the hands of rogue terrorists is vital to national security (and boy is it ever), then where are the three cheers for President Bush and Clinton for doing so as the Soviet Union—and its nuclear stockpile—disintegrated into chaos and lawlessness?

But this is the weirdest part. I didn’t quote you the beginning of the piece. This is how Carroll opened his column:

CONSTANCE HOLDEN had worked as a writer at Science magazine since 1970. Reports portrayed her as a fiery redhead, “extraordinary, passionate, and funny,’’ as one of her colleagues said. Writing award-winning articles about mental illness, she was well acquainted with the human condition, and the idea of sudden death would doubtless have been familiar to her. It is safe to assume that, given her expertise, she would have taken individual mortality for granted — even if, like everyone, she would have been hard put to imagine her own. Yet, on a street in Washington last week, Constance Holden died. Preparing to mount her bicycle to ride home from work, she was hit by a D.C. National Guard truck deployed for the traffic lock-down around President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit.

Lest you not see the connection, he makes it for you:

Constance Holden is an accidental casualty of that good effort, which lends an unwanted but authentic nobility to her story’s end. Her death stands apart from others, which, while no less heartbreaking, lack such a direct link to a history-making effort. To those who knew her, a world ended on the street that day, and a universe of affection went dark. But the frail web of human culture itself will prove to be just that vulnerable if we are not careful now. An individual death is a tragedy, yes, but, against the infamous maxim, so would be the mass death of nuclear war — tragedy squared, since we humans have been given chance after chance to see it coming and do something.

Constance Holden, may she rest in peace, died as part of Obama’s summit. No one blames him (though the federal government has been knocking off pedestrians and cyclists with alarming frequency); the two are barely related.

So then what is Carroll doing turning a photo op for burnishing the president’s foreign policy image into a cause for justifiable homicide? I am sorry to her loved ones for her loss, but what is “noble” or “good” or “history making” about getting run over by a National Guard truck? As a cyclist (and as one myself), she would have known what her odds were of getting hurt while riding. I Google Mapped the location (New York Ave near 12th St NW, Washington, DC), and there are six lanes to negotiate—not the most dangerous of intersections, but no picnic either.

I’m just sad. Sad that someone with the wonderful name of Constance Holden is dead. Sad for the driver of the truck that killed her (as a driver as well as a cyclist, I nearly have a heart attack every
time some cyclist weaves and wends around my car).

Sad that I don’t believe our president has our national security as his first priority.

But not so sad as to be insensitive enough to try to make sense out of a senseless death.