A dispatch from Buenos Aires in the international section of today's New York Times reports on the lingering pain of a woman whose "leftist husband disappeared" during Argentina's "dirty war." The man "finally went underground because of his sympathies with the left-wing Montonero guerillas," the Times says.
The Times reports that relatives of the disappeared "find it offensive that the Argentine state, whose systematic use of violence against their family members violated every canon of the rule of law, now cites that same principle as the reason it cannot provide compensation."
Well, talk about the use of violence violating the rule of law, how about the record of the Montoneros? They were responsible for the 1974 kidnapping of Exxon executive Victor Samuelson, not to mention attacks on other Western business executives. That does not excuse the tactics that the Argentine government used in response, but the history is a lot more complex than the one-sided story painted by today's Times dispatch.
Restraint: The lead editorial in today's New York Times declares, "adding a new weapon to America's nuclear arsenal would normally require a resumption of nuclear testing, ending the voluntary moratorium on such tests that now helps restrain the nuclear weapons programs of countries like North Korea and Iran." If the Times thinks that the Iranian nuclear weapons program is being restrained by the American test moratorium, the newspaper is deluded. The moratorium did not stop the Pakistanis from testing their atom bomb. If the Iranians are exercising such restraint, why are they pouring so many resources into building the nuclear reactor at Bushehr?