The Pendragon's Hall

I'm glad Pat Robertson has apologized for his foolish outburst the other day. But is it not the slightest bit intriguing that in 1997 Clinton advisor and media darling George Stephanopolous authored a Newsweek column calling for the assassination of Saddam Hussein and nobody said a word? Stephanopolous actually argued that Saddam was too great a threat to be left alone, that all the usual channels of stopping him had failed, and that Clinton employing an assassin would be preferably to a mass bombing raid that would "inevitably kill innocent civilians." I guess George didn't get the memo: Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was safely contained in Iraq by US/UN forces. The thing is, however, Pat Robertson is essentially a tele-evangelist who likes to shoot off at the mouth occasionally. He is not a serious policy-shaper. George Stephanopolous was that. He even offered Clinton advice on how to get around President Ford's ban on assassination of foreign leaders. Yet nobody appeared to be worried. Why? Well, one reason is that Clinton's government could do no wrong in the eyes of mainstream media. But another, subtler, reason is that everyone, I mean everyone, was convinced that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous man who needed to be removed for the threat he posed to the United States. And so nobody really cared how we did it. Probably many were impressed that the Clinton administration, so dovish when they themselves were in danger of being sent to war, were willing to "get tough" with Saddam. Unfortunately it was all talk. Saddam was left for the next administration to deal with. Thank God we finally got someone with a backbone.