by David A. Bell

I agree with Jeff Herf that too many mainstream figures apparently still believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad couldn't possibly mean what he says about wiping Israel and the United States off the map. Still, the present conflict remains different from past ones in an important respect: At least in the United States, our adversaries have hardly any active supporters. Still, there are a few: the last survivors of a long and dishonorable tradition of totalitarian fellow travelling that began in tragedy and long ago passed deep into farce. One of the most farcical is Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson's attorney general and long-standing crank, who now forms part of Saddam Hussein's defense team. Yesterday, the BBC interviewed him at length, and it was hard not to burst out laughing. You felt that the clip must have been a parody--something out of the Jon Stewart show, or an audio version of The Onion. At one point, Clark actually claimed that Saddam's 1982 Dujail massacre amounted to nothing but a series of lawful executions, and compared the 140 victims (some of them boys as young as 13) to the 152 prisoners executed in Texas during the governorship of George W. Bush. Someone should take Clark and preserve him under glass, a badly decayed specimen of a once-powerful species now mercifully close (let us hope!) to extinction. The sad thing is that a lot of the BCC's British listeners probably took him seriously, if this Michael Wolff piece is to be believed.