A Few Choice Words

Hill's Patience No Virtue

Here’s what diplomacy is all about.

Six-party talks to get North Korea to give up the Bomb resumed on November 11, and Chief US negotiator Christopher Hill declared that all sides should exercise patience. No major breakthroughs, but it was a good start, he reported, “very businesslike. . . a very strong diplomatic process.”

Little more than a month later, Mr. Hill seems to have reversed his attitude, no doubt responding to conditions on the ground. On December 18, he told reporters,

“There's been a lot of damage done to the six-party process. I made the point that the supply of our patience may have exceeded the international demand for that patience, and that we should be a little less patient and pick up the pace and work a little faster.”

Hill has an economics degree from the John Bolton School of Peace Negotiation. If the price level of patience has been so devalued in one month’s time, they’ll probably be firing guns across the table in January.

A Neo-Nazi Lunch: Lies with Your Home Fries

The just-concluded two-day conference on the Holocaust makes me wonder what the Iranians served to their guests during the lunch breaks. Did they go with aash, kookoo and polow or did they try to be more Continental, more Western? It makes a difference.

As often happens, food is more important than talk. We all know what the talk was about: the statistical insignificance of the Holocaust, assertion of the right to “scientific” inquiry, freedom of speech. Giving the finger to the West, putting a thumb in Israel’s eye.

The outrage was more vocal in Europe than in the U.S., of course. We can’t even figure out whether to isolate Iran or enlist its cooperation vis-à-vis Iraq.

But I want to know what they ate. Imagine these guys sitting down to lunch—David Duke, our Klan representative, several Orthodox rabbis, some “researchers” (67, according to the foreign ministry in Teheran). Did they eat with their fingers? Did anybody order in from a deli? Was there any comment on the Nazi flags perched on the meatballs? The scene had to be like something out of a Mel Brooks movie.

As they eat, so shall ye know them.