By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Ariel Sharon wants a peace treaty for the sake of posterity. Dean will lose to Bush in 2004. Noah Webster was surprised by his wife. New York Times columnist William Safire offered these insights and predictions to about 350 close friends of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle at their annual Community Campaign dinner on Dec. 4.
In his opening, Safire fell back on his reputation as a wordsmith: In 1806, when Noah Webster was writing the first American dictionary, Safire recounted, he was in his office one day when his wife came in unannounced and found the noted lexicographer with his secretary on his lap.
“Noah, I’m surprised,” his wife said.
“No, my dear,” the great man answered. “You’re astonished. It is we who are surprised.”
Promising that was his last joke, Safire went on to discuss the so-called Geneva Accords, the unofficial Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty unveiled in the Swiss capital a few days earlier, and his reading of the state of affairs in Iraq and the Middle East, in general.
Safire started off by identifying himself as “a right-wing hawk.”
“My big moment of the year happened about six weeks ago,” he said, “when Daylight Savings ended and I could actually turn back the clock.” That was, in fact, his last joke of the night, though by no means the last witticism to draw a laugh.
While he broke little new ground and offered few surprises to those who have read his more than two dozen books and his Pulitzer Prize-winning commentaries on the Times op-ed page, Safire did provide a thoroughly reasoned explanation of his views. The audience proved receptive to his general stances in favor of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and his unwavering support of the Sharon Administration’s policies in Israel.
On Iraq, Safire outlined what he understood as the three reasons for the war — what he called the “growing danger — that’s been escalated since into an imminent danger” of weapons of mass destruction.
“What made it a near certainty was the logic of the situation,” Safire said. “[Saddam Hussein] refused to have UN inspectors come in. That was costing him $10 billion a year. Now, did it make any sense at all to forego $10 billion in oil profits a year for no reason?”
The second was “the monstrosity dimension.”
“Here was a man that was the modern Hitler, who was killing 10-20,000 people a year in his country. That’s not just a wild exaggeration,” he said, adding that the recent discovery of mass graves in the north and to the south of Baghdad had confirmed those estimates.
The third, and in his mind the most compelling argument is the neo-conservative view that September 11 had created the conditions for adopting “Wilsonian idealism” to turn around what he called “the terrible momentum of Islamic fundamentalism that was designed to attack the West.”
Referring to Woodrow Wilson’s idea of making the world safe for democracy at the end of World War I, Safire’s contention is that, by supplanting the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hussein in Iraq with pro-American democratic governments, the U.S. could set in motion a liberalizing movement throughout the Middle East, even to the point of spurring a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In response to a question later in the evening, Safire said he believes that Sharon, who he has a longtime close personal relationship with, is “dying to make a deal.”
“He’s talking about painful compromises. He’s ready to change on some of those settlements, not just the illegal ones but the legal ones,” the columnist said of the Israeli prime minister. “Not the Ariel settlement but…some of those settlements that require too much Israeli Army protection and are really provocations in the midst of the Gaza are not going to be continued,” Safire said.
“This is the time, this is the man who is eager to not go down in Israeli history as the man who did not make peace, but he wants to be the one who brought peace with security. Sharon, the man of the right, can drag a lot of the right into an agreement that the right would not stand for if a man of the left had negotiated it.”
At the same time, he derided the Geneva Accords and similar attempts by people out of office in Israel and the Palestinian Authority to promote final settlement terms as “public relations” stunts that have no real prospect of moving the process forward.
As for why the international press had given so much space to reporting on the December 1 announcement in Geneva, Safire said, “There is a general feeling of reporters all over the world that we’re for the underdog and Palestinians have usurped the Israelis’ position as underdog ever since 1967. So that is built into the overly friendly coverage of a false deal and a closing of the eye to the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to take charge of their land — the land they’ve already got.”
“I am sometimes in error; I am never in doubt,” Safire said in advance of predicting the outcome of next year’s presidential race and looking ahead to 2008. Safire answered the final question of the night by noting his support for Howard Dean’s candidacy, “because I remember George McGovern and the campaign in which McGovern lost 49 of the 50 states.”
“In New Hampshire, you don’t campaign on television; you don’t campaign at huge rallies. It’s 20, 30 people at a time in living rooms,” he said. “I was speaking to one of the editors up there…and he was saying, ‘You know, he’s not doing well in those small groups. For some reason, people don’t like him.’ He comes on very strong and arrogant and angry.”
Safire said the person to watch for an upset in New Hampshire was not John Kerry but John Edwards, the North Carolina senator, who does campaign well in small groups.
Returning to the “conventional wisdom” he had just tweaked, Safire predicted that Dean would win the nomination and go on to lose 40 states in November, setting up a 2008 race between Sen. Hillary Rodam Clinton (D-NY) and Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.