GO AND TELL THE IRAQIS:

The Guns of September (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, September 13, 2002, NY Times)

Contrast Mr. Bush's appearance with a legendary moment at the United Nations. On Oct. 25, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson denounced the new Russian missile sites in Cuba.

The Russians and Cubans scoffed that it was all a lie, so Stevenson brought in an easel and blown-up photos of the Cuban sites.

Where is the comparable evidence of urgency today?

It's the Bush administration that raised the parallel to the missile crisis, noting that Kennedy had considered pre-emptive strikes. Fair enough.

Yet it is the differences that are most telling. To begin with, Kennedy used the U.N. spotlight to offer specific, incontrovertible evidence of an urgent new threat - and then he opted not for an invasion of Cuba but for an internationally supported naval quarantine.

"Yes, Kennedy did consider a lot of alternatives, including military strikes," recalled Theodore Sorensen, a key aide to Kennedy during the crisis. "But after considering the innocent civilians who would be killed, considering the international law that would be broken, Kennedy rejected that possibility."

Since Mr. Kristof is going on about the Cuban Missile Crisis, it might be a good time to note that it was one of the signal defeats in US foreign policy history. Mr. Kennedy choked when we were offered the perfect pretext to remove a Communist dictator in our Hemisphere and so today, forty years later, Fidel Castro is still oppressing the people of Cuba.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 15, 2002 2:31 PM