Christopher Hitchens writes in an apparently offline column for Vanity Fair (April 2006) that
on April 16, 2004, President George Bush proposed bombing the Al Jazeera network headquarters, in Qatar, and was talked out of it only by Tony Blair.
The gist of the Hitchens column is that, while awaiting his American citizenship, he has decided to throw himself into civil-liberties disputes that could get him in deep doo-doo both in his native country and his adopted country. The British matter concerns the leaking of the above fact, recorded in a top-secret document, for which the Blair government is prosecuting the alleged leaker and leakee.
Regarding Bush's bizarre plan, Hitchens writes: "I've tried to imagine the possible effect of that in the Arab world ... Let's just say that it would have put a large and smoldering hole in Karen Hughes's 'Make Nice' diplomacy. It would furthermore have raised the suspicion that the American bombing of Al Jazeera's Baghdad office in 2003, which killed a reporter, had not been a regrettable accident."
I still do not understand the hot-potato status of Al Jazeera in a country with the free-est and fairest media liberties in the world. Hopefully someday we can look back at the President's idea and laugh -- and not a rueful laugh, either.
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