Last night, while other heads of state joined President Obama for a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi repaired to the Libyan Mission to attend to diplomatic business. The Swiss premier Hans-Rudolf Merz was paying a visit in an effort to restore normal relations between the two countries.

The fissure began last August, when Muammar’s son Hannibal was arrested in Geneva together with his wife on charges of beating up two of their domestic servants. Like an American government linking foreign policy to human rights, the Libyan regime stood firm on respect for its aristocratic privileges. It conveyed its extreme displeasure, with consequences threatened, to the Swiss government. (Never mind that the central government has little say over the actions of the police and judiciary in an individual canton.) The complaint was soon dropped as the servants received some form of compensation, but that was not the end of the matter.

In retaliation for the initial insult, Libya withdrew assets from Swiss banks, cut off ties with Swiss businesses, and withheld oil deliveries. Shortly thereafter, two Swiss businessmen were detained in Tripoli for holding improper visas. An eye for an eye. After many months of negotiations failed to secure the prisoners’ freedom, Merz traveled personally to Libya in August and apologized to the Libyan people for Hannibal’s arrest. He claims to have been orally promised and to have received some kind of written assurance that this would be enough to get them home. But the Libyan government then declared that it could hardly interfere so brazenly in the legal process; the matter would have to play out in court. The Swiss premier flew back to Bern, his countrymen and his dignity remaining behind.

And so he went again last night to supplicate before Qaddafi in New York, presumably bringing his checkbook and plenty of shoe polish. Just what Merz can hope to get from the meeting is unknown, especially given how jet-lagged the volatile colonel declared himself to be at the beginning of his two-hour address yesterday at the General Assembly. One hopes for the sake of the two prisoners that Merz postdated any payment for after their release.

Message to the State Department: Never pay a Qaddafi today for a hamburger on Tuesday.

The State Department runs a project in Libya called “Governing Justly and Democratically, Investing in People, and Economic Growth.” Earlier this month, State informed Congress that $2.5 million will be spent in 2009 to advance these goals. But the money will not be directed to, say, groups promoting human rights and private enterprise. Rather, one learns from State’s memo, the lion’s share of the funds will be funneled through agencies of the Libyan government. Then there is $400,000 for a pair of “nongovernmental organizations”—which happen to be run by, respectively, the son Saif and daughter Aisha of President Muammar Qaddafi.

It takes a special kind of earnestness to believe that the Qadaffi regime, which is the supreme authority on all matters and which controls the oil industry that accounts for 95 percent of the country’s exports, will blazon the path to “transparency,” “business ethics,” and “judicial independence,” to take a few of the aims mentioned by State. The charitable explanation for this Orwellian poppycock is that it is euphemism for bribes that are quietly serving American interests. But as Congressman Mark Kirk of Illinois points out in a letter to the President, it was none other than Saif Qadaffi himself, head of the foundation, that negotiated the release of the Lockerbie murderer and escorted him to his hero’s welcome in Tripoli. He must be laughing all the way to the bank.

John’s mention of it in his obituary note put me in mind of my own first encounter with Robert Novak’s Israel problem. It was a CNN talk show a couple of months after 9/11, and the subject was Hamas, long before the group even made a pretense of running kindergartens and standing up government ministers.

Here is the transcript:

NOVAK: Can you imagine the audacity? Secretary Powell makes a very balanced speech, says they both have to do things, recognize each other’s existence. Prime Minister Sharon says, yes, that’s fine. Immediately the next day they have this attack on Hamas targeting, as they’ve been targeting ever since he came in as prime minister, people to be killed.

Now, the question all over the Middle East is: Is the United States going to take this conduct by Israel lying down, or are they going to say this is unacceptable behavior? And the one thing that was very disappointing about the secretary’s speech was he didn’t criticize the Sharon line that you have to have seven days without violence before he’ll sit down to even talk with the Palestinians. You can’t have seven days without violence if the Israelis are going to start the provocation.

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A common theme has sprung up among certain liberal commentators in reaction to this week’s events in Iran. Taking their cue from President Obama’s cautious, equivocal statement about the Iranian election and his calculated refusal to offer the democracy protesters his full-throated support, pundits have given utterance to the following sentiment: Who are we, sullied as we are by the past eight years of inhumanity abroad and by other instances of meddling in the affairs of foreign countries, to speak out on behalf of democracy? How dare we.

A particularly unadulterated sample of this theme can be found in this column in Time, which another pundit approvingly cited as an exposé of the “ignorance and arrogance” of Charles Krauthammer and Paul Wolfowitz, full-throated democracy supporters both, one of whom “pioneered torture” and the other of whom advocated “pulverizing Gaza.”

It follows logically from the shamefaced repudiation of America that if we do speak up in support of beleaguered democrats and provoke the tyrants into violence against them, we are the ones to blame. As the Time column warns, “You don’t want the blood to be on your hands.” (Your hands, not the tyrants’.)

Two American journalists remain imprisoned in North Korea by the Communist regime of Kim Jong-il. Earlier this week, the state news agency announced that Euna Lee and Laura Ling admitted in their closed “trial” that they had crossed into the country illegally, with the intent “to isolate and stifle the socialist system of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by faking up moving images aimed at falsifying its human rights performance and hurling slanders and calumnies at it.” Not coincidentally, this revelation came hours before President Obama was to meet with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak to discuss ongoing provocations by the North.

Yet at the press conference that followed the meeting, President Obama said nothing about the plight of the two Americans. (He did say that North Korea’s integration into the community of nations “can only be reached through peaceful negotiations that achieve the full and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and his press secretary added that the President “hopes that [North Korea] will return to the path that they were on in taking steps to denuclearize the Peninsula.”

How has the administration responded to the arrest and twelve-years’-hard-labor sentence meted out to Lee and Ling? President Obama and numerous aides have beseeched Kim Jong-il to release the pair on “humanitarian grounds”–an abject appeal that outwardly accepts the justice of their circus trial. On Monday, the State Department went into full damage-control mode to insist that, contrary to a hint by Secretary of State Clinton, it was unlikely that the administration would do much about a congressional request to reinstate North Korea on the list of terror-sponsoring countries. The New York Times reports that the administration is considering dispatching a special envoy to negotiate Lee and Ling’s release, but has so far kept its cards close so as (the Times suggests) not to “harden the North’s position.” Governor Bill Richardson, who is schooled in the art of diplomatic etiquette, explains that “talk of an envoy is premature, because what first has to happen is a framework for negotiations on a potential humanitarian release. . . . What we would try to seek would be some kind of a political pardon.”

This is where the coddling of rogue regimes leads you–tens of thousands of troops on North Korea’s border and supervision over the country’s fuel and food imports all reduced to sound and fury, signifying nothing. So Lee, who has a four-year-old daughter, and Ling, who has an ulcerous condition, can languish in a North Korean prison camp awaiting ransom.

On the cancellation of a blog:

I suspect neocon pressure to remove anyone holding Cheney to account.

To be fair, though, he was up all night.

Something didn’t smell right about the city’s triumphant announcement that a sting operation had led to the arrest of four men who had placed dummy bombs outside two Bronx synagogues. How far would these “sad sacks” have really gone, asks Zachary Roth at Talking Points Memo, without the aid and encouragement of the undercover law-enforcement agents?

Frankly, it’s also hard not to feel some compassion for what looks like a group of struggling, credulous, under-educated men, existing on the fringes of society, who lacked the intelligence or willpower to avoid getting taken in by a government informant anxious to mitigate his own situation, and by their own vague understanding of radical Islam and the hole it might fill in their lives.

More from Roth:

Is sending a government mole out to scrounge up a few dimwitted ex-cons who can be talked–and perhaps bribed–into getting involved in a fictitious bomb plot really the best way to use our limited terror-fighting resources?

Finally,

There’s little doubt the bumbling would-be bombers went far enough with the plot to demonstrate that they had the intention to commit terror, and for that they’ll pay the price. But the whole tale comes off perhaps more as a sad glimpse into the lives of a loose group of aimless and obscurely embittered Americans than as a dire illustration of the threat of home-grown terrorism.

For anyone with eyes to see, what this episode really illustrates—and hardly for the first time—is how worryingly simple it is to pull off a terror attack in an open society. No complicated weapons wielded by well-adjusted brainiacs are required; a gun or explosive device and a public place will suffice for most any “dimwit.” Law-enforcement agencies have few alternatives to seeking out those inclined to commit such acts and thwarting them.

According to Nicholas Kristof, writing in the New York Times last Sunday, American politicians, whether Republicans or Democrats, always bite their tongues when it comes to discussions about Israel. Both sides have “learned to muzzle themselves” and to acquiesce in President Bush’s “crushing embrace” of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. “That silence,” he argues, “harms America, Middle East peace prospects, and Israel itself.” Kristof’s piece is part of a growing genre: criticism of Israel whose starting point is to bemoan how such criticism cannot be made in public.

In Israel, Kristof informs us, there are no such constraints. Debates there “about the use of force and the occupation of Palestinian territories” are healthily “vitriolic.” “Why can’t [our] candidates be as candid as Israelis?”

Among the examples of sabra candor he admires is a 2004 remark made by Tommy Lapid, then Israel’s justice minister, comparing the Israeli army’s razing of a house in Gaza to the Nazis’ dispossession of his grandmother during World War II. “Can you imagine an American cabinet secretary ever saying such a thing?,” asks Kristof. He omits the fact that the house in question was an entry point for a network of tunnels running across the adjacent border with Egypt, tunnels used for smuggling terrorist weapons. Nor does he attempt to explain how our political conversation might be improved by importing Nazi analogies as irresponsible as Lapid’s. Is this the sort of “discussion” that Kristof wants to see? Read the rest of this entry »