RUTHFULLY YOURS

Venona intercepts indicate that Soviet GRU officer/State Department official Alger Hiss was awarded the USSR Order of the Red Star (above) after the Yalta conference.

—Readers of the often-perverse National Review will have noticed that FDR biographer and convicted felon Conrad Black has opened an extended firefight with Angelo Codevilla over Codevilla’s review-essay in the Claremont Review of Books about Henry Kissinger’s recent book.

Codevilla notes:

My review’s one and only reference to Conrad Black was to quote his praise of Kissinger’s book: “brilliantly conceived and executed . . . even by Henry Kissinger’s very high standards.” Black construes this as an “attack” on him, of “extreme belligerence.” Who am I to disagree?

Who, indeed. But such galactic departures from reality are quite routine for Black.

The “War on Terror” continues 14 years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Looking back further, it is more than 22 years since terrorists from the Middle East carried out deadly terror attacks at CIA Headquarters in Virginia (January 25, 1993) and the World Trade Center, in New York City, just one month later (February 26, 1993).
Make no mistake. We are at war with a vicious and insidious enemy that wants nothing less than the utter destruction of our nation and our way of life. They have committed unthinkable atrocities and undoubtedly will continue to slaughter, by the most barbaric means possible, anyone who stands in the way of their goals.

The purpose of my article is to ask a derivative of the fundamental question that was posed repeatedly in the 1976 movie thriller, Marathon Man: “Is it safe?” We must now ask, “Are we safe?” It begs the question that has a direct bearing on our security: “Have our leaders learned the lessons that history should have taught them?”

A remarkable four minutes of video has emerged from Secretary of State Kerry’s testimony before the Senate. It shows the Secretary squirming under the questioning of Senator Cotton on what the agile Arkansan calls the “two secret side deals” between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran. They are related to inspections of the Iranian regime. The video shows the two leaders of the American negotiating team — Mr. Kerry and Secretary Moniz of the energy department — stating that they don’t know who, if anyone, has read these two secret agreements.

This is a choice moment for those who remember the first of President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.” Those were the Fourteen Points for ending World War One. The Fourteenth was the infamous League of Nations, the idea of a world government. But the First Point, the number one point of principle on which all foreign policy in the age of democracy was going to rest, the opening article in the drive that was eventually to spawn the United Nations, this number one article was “open covenants.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu learned that U.S. Secretary of State will be making a trip to the Middle East to sell the Iran deal, but is skipping Israel.

Kerry will be visiting Egypt and Qatar and other Gulf State representatives, but won’t stop in the Jewish State, which until recently was considered America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

The Prime Minister’s response to the snub was, “Really, Kerry has no reason to come here.”

Expanding upon that response, Netanyahu said of the Iran deal, “This deal has nothing to do with us. We are not influenced by this deal at all. We aren’t partners at the table, we are a meal on the menu.”

Dictators who receive help from America are getting away without any pressure to reform.

Forty years ago this week the Helsinki Final Act, a diplomatic masterpiece, showed how it could be done. It helped to defuse the Cold War, appeared to give the Soviet bloc the security it craved but, by setting up a mechanism to scrutinise human rights, gave legitimacy to dissident groups who started to subvert communism from within. “If you open that Pandora’s Box, you never know what Trojan’ horses will jump out,” as the former foreign secretary Ernie Bevin once had it.