The New Nevilles

Bill Clinton, a heartbeat away from the presidency, is exhibiting a politician's essence with cynical candor: almost daily breach of promise to the voters and theft from the taxpayers. He is raising both taxes and the deficit; he is preparing to inflict a Soviet-style health system; he is about to provide the EPA with veto powers over any government agency's proposal before it reaches the White House; he is treating the politically correct but largely self-inflicted venereal disease of AIDS as if the panicky forecasts of a few years ago were correct ("...unless we are prepared to confront the AIDS crisis we [might] not have any Americans left" says his brilliant HHS Secretary Shalala); he misses no opportunity to panic people into support for more government interference requiring more taxes.

But I will let that go, for there are publications with more space to treat these points (Reason, The National Review). I will even let the energy tax go (though I can't resist snickering at making "alternative" sources tax-exempt; it's like an income-tax exemption for one-eyed twins with yellow fever).

Instead, let me look at Billary's science policy. A sample of his science adviser's intellect appears in this month's "stark raving mad" column. I am all in favor of the proposal to underfund the SST mega-science project, which takes away money from more pressing work. I am also in favor of cutting the funds of NASA, which has gone out of its way to hamstring private competitors.

But the danger of cutting funds or even phasing out the SDI, derided as "star wars," is the deadliest of all bird-brained schemes about to be proposed. Here is the one thing that government is for: legal force to be used against aggressors and criminals. Health, education, science or anything else do not require laws enforced by guns.

Instead, the public gets a lullaby as to how the collapse of the USSR (brought about mainly by its inability to match the SDI) has made the SDI unnecessary. Even if the ex-USSR were not drifting daily closer to a take-over by an alliance of nationalists, clerics, and ex-Soviet power wielders, the SDI is needed to ward off nuclear missile attacks by the Assads, Saddams and Khaddafis of this world. No longer are they being stopped by technological restraints. What has hitherto held them in check was the lack of trained scientists, and the collapse of the USSR, far from eliminating the need for the SDI, has made its need acute. With or without the various ex-Soviet republics' consent, there is no policy that can stop a steady treacle of trained scientists and technicians to where they get work for a meaningful salary.

There will, fortunately, be a warning: the first to shoot a nuclear missile at London or New York will not send 6,000 of them; there will be a little time for people to feel the only form of education that works: to be hit over the head.

In the face of this lethal danger, the professional appeasers are appearing on the world scene. Cyrus Vance, Carter's foreign secretary, has kept the dreadful war in ex-Yugoslavia going, arranging for the 57^th cease-fire when after the breach of the first he should have publicly looked for the Serb warlords who have the power to enforce it. Christopher Warren, Carter's brilliant hostage retriever, is a disciple of negotiations for negotiations' sake, never mind about what or with whom or why, just negotiate. Rep. Ron Dellums, who sought prior approval of his speeches by the Communist government of Granada (as found in their files), is now chairman of the House Defense Committee.

Professional appeasers must have somebody to appease, and they will look for him and find him at all costs. Car bombs are used only by the IRA and the Arabs. The timing ruled out the IRA, but God forbid anyone should offend the Arabs, so they leaked a "suspicion" that it was connected with the war in Bosnia, a suspicion as credible as suspecting the Oshkosh, Wisc., Union of bricklayers. Even more infuriating is the constant talk of the "ethnic" ties between Russia and the Serbs. They are both Slavs, yes, but except for the Albanians (in Kosovo, which has not yet exploded), all, repeat all, ex-Yugoslavs are Slavs: Slovenes, Croatians, Serbs, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrans, you name them. (What's more, except for the Slovenes, who have their own language, the others speak the same language, Serbo-Croatian, which the Croats write in Latin characters and the others in Cyrillics; but a tape recorder writes them both the same way.) The infuiriating part about it is that there is indeed a special relationship between Serbia and Russia, but it is hardly "ethnic": Serbia had always been the front man or even puppet for Tsarist expansionism in the Balkans (read the history before and after the Congress of Berlin in 1870). But God forbid that this should be known to Americans, who can usually be relied on, especially with the present "educational" system, never to have heard of such things. What the contemporary Neville Chamberlains want in this case is to appease those in Russia who seek a return to an expansion autocracy.