Quote of the day

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the "Peace Process" and Northern Ireland's "Deputy First Minister", Martin McGuinness:

The "irony," Michael Goldfarb writes in "Peace is not about justice" (Views, Dec. 8, 2007), is that "the price of conjuring peace out of conflict is that justice is not done; most crimes go unpunished." That has surely been the case in Northern Ireland.

And yet there is a problem. If IRA leaders are appointed to high office, what good reason is there for pursuing Ratko Mladic? This is not said frivolously. The Belfast journalist John O'Farrell has reviewed McGuinness's career, culminating in his appointment as, of all things, minister of education (or "Minister For Surviving Children," as someone sarcastically put it), and observed that "the children of Northern Ireland will have their futures in the hands of a man who, if he were Serb, would be indicted at The Hague."

But then he isn't a Serb, and one should remember that one of the gravest of all Serbian crimes is that there aren't enough Serbian Americans.