HAWKISH ON HISTORY, DOVISH ON THE PRESENT:

If you've ever read any of the studies and commentaries by the Media Research Center, you'll be familiar with Peter Jennings's well-documented anti-conservative, anti-Israel, and pro-Arab biases. If not, here's a representative essay about it.

At any rate, it came as a great shock to find the following quote from Mr. Jennings, which were you to swap out Japan and replace it with Iraq would very nearly justify nuking Baghdad, (Peter Jennings's final remarks on the 40th Anniversary of Hiroshima, 8/05/85, ABC News)

The ceremonies here to mark the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb are almost over. Japan's Prime Minister Nakasone has just spoken to the crowd, telling them again, of course, to remember to keep the image of what war can cost in their minds. And not far from where we stand, a peace bell, which you may hear, which people come from all over the world to ring.

Those people who died at Hiroshima and later at Nagasaki were killed by the atomic bomb, but they really died because of an evil Japanese ideology. There was scarcely a crime the Japanese had not committed in their drive to conquer the world. Today's Japanese are uncompromising in their commitment to peace. They're forever coming up and thanking Americans for setting Japan on the road to democracy. So for the Japanese, Hiroshima was a terrible lesson, but they appear to have learned it well.

It's odd how easily even the most dedicated Leftist can, in retrospect, appreciate that ridding a Germany of Hitler, a Japan of fascism, and Eastern Europe of communism were unalloyed goods, but can not imagine that ridding the Middle East of its Islamicism and other variants of totalitarian ideology will be similarly worthwhile and will, forty years from now, make us heroes in the eyes of the freed peoples.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 23, 2002 1:17 PM