In his column of December 26, 2002, Robert Novak attacked Condoleezza Rice for citing Hezbollah, instead of al-Qaeda, as the world's most dangerous terrorist organization: "In truth, Hezbollah is the world's most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel's standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. 'Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing,' Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization's secretary-general, said in a recent New York Times interview." The sheik did not say, and Novak did not bother to add, that Hezbollah twice bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering more than 60 people, and drove a suicide bomb into a Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 servicemen.
I think Novak was right on target for attacking Condoleeza Rice on this one. In fact, the Beirut incidents were one of the few cases in which the Reagan administration can rightly be criticized for its approach to a foreign policy matter.
I posted many concerns about the "war in Afghanistan" here on FreeRepublic, but not because I believed the U.S. efforts there would be futile. It simply made no sense to me (and still does not to this day) to have the U.S. wage war in a foreign nation after 9/11 without first (or simultaneously) sacking the bureaucrats throughout the U.S. government who utter incompetence made 9/11 possible in the first place.
Although he had denied any vital American interest in either Kuwait's oilfields or Iraq's oilfields or its aggression, in l991 he urged that the Sixth Fleet be sent to Dubrovnik to shield the Catholics of Croatia from Serbian attack. "Croatia is not some faraway desert emirate," he explained. "It is a 'piece of the continent, a part of the main,' a Western republic that belonged to the Habsburg empire and was for centuries the first line of defense of Christian Europe. For their ceaseless resistance to the Ottoman Turks, Croatia was proclaimed by Pope Leo X to be the 'Antemurale Christianitatis,' the bulwark of Christianity."
This passage itself is deceptive because it is incomplete. While it is true that Buchanan supported U.S. intervention on behalf of Croatia, his rationale was not limited to the religious babbling you see here. It was Buchanan (and nobody else, BTW) who pointed out that Dubrovnik at one time was part of a small city-state on the Adriatic Sea called Raguso, which happened to be one of the first countries in the world to officially recognize the Thirteen Colonies as an independent nation.