A columnist is never honoured in his own country

Way back in the early 80’s when I joined the working world, I use ride with my grandfather on the streetcar every morning into the garment district. When he was done with his Toronto Sun he’d hand it off to me to finish. Inspite of the cheesy pictures and a million and one ads for televisions and stereo equipment, there was a surprising array of top notch columnists. This was where I first read George Jonas, and this is why I have never stopped reading George Jonas (on the anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising);

I was in Budapest, Hungary, 50 years ago, looking forward to a heavy date. I expected it to be with a girl -- well, a married woman, really -- but it ended up being a date with history. The married lady never appeared in the little patisserie where we were supposed to meet, not far from my office in Radio Budapest. The Hungarian revolution did, replacing the powdered sugar on top of a tray of cream buns with broken glass.

Since my date didn't show, I sauntered over to the Radio building to check out the revolution. "Sauntered" is the wrong word. I ran in a crouch from doorway to doorway, as people instinctively do when they hear gunfire, as if crouching made the slightest difference.

For the next 10 days, I taped interviews on my portable reel-to-reel Uher, a high-tech machine for 1956, much admired on both sides of the barricades. After November 4, when the Soviets returned in force to crush the uprising, I forged some papers that gave me access to "the Zone," a strip of land leading up to the old Iron Curtain. By Christmas, I was in Canada. When I first saw my erstwhile date again, 13 years later, we were two curious strangers, wondering why we were about to wreck a marriage in another time and place.

The uprising, a defining event of my life, seemed like a damned nuisance the day it happened: unexpected, inconvenient and not very significant. Two of these judgments were ludicrously mistaken. One was accurate, but then revolutions are seldom convenient. They turn things upside down by definition, making those that mattered in the morning matter little by nightfall, and vice versa.

On Iraq:

The war I supported (as I've written repeatedly) ended on Dec. 13, 2003. That's when Saddam was pulled from his "spider-hole" somewhere in the boonies. On that day, coalition forces should have said: "It's all yours now, we're pulling out." They might have added: "Make the best of it and we'll stand by with aid and investment; relapse into hostile tyranny and we'll be back with missiles and marines."

What would have happened? Chaos? Civil war? Probably -- which is what's happening now. The artificial edifice of Iraq may well have collapsed, but it wouldn't have collapsed on the U.S.-led coalition's head. If Bush the president had only heeded the wise words of Bush the candidate -- "no nation-building!" -- or the equally wise words of Napoleon's minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who said to the emperor: "You can do everything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them," Bush would have abandoned Iraq in triumph instead of the way he may have to abandon it now: with his tail between his legs.

The mistake wasn't going into Iraq; the mistake was to stay. The mistake wasn't resorting to bayonets; the mistake was trying to sit on them. The mistake wasn't to remove a tyrant who wasn't ready to go; the mistake was to try to build a nation that wasn't ready to be. The mistake wasn't leading a horse to water, the mistake was trying to make it drink. With the best of intentions, America managed to make Iraq's problem its own. Now the U.S. President is standing on the riverbank, hanging on to a spooked, rearing, kicking horse. It's not a pretty sight.

On principle of proportionality and Canadian Liberals:

The issue of proportionality may be new. It's smuggled into the moral debate by terrorists and their left-lib apologists to escape the consequences of their misdeeds. First they fire mortars and Katyusha rockets at Israeli civilians, then plead proportionality -- a bizarre demand in any but a sporting contest. If taken literally, it would call for modern armies to scrap their missiles and smart bombs and fight with nothing except weapons and tactics available to the Taliban.

As self-styled men of God, Hezbollah fighters ought to remember the Lord didn't say: Sow the wind and you'll reap a proportionate wind. He said: Sow the wind and you'll reap the whirlwind.

Perhaps the Liberal party's theologians will sort this out one day, but they're unlikely to sort it out in time for the next election, and unlikely to retain the Jewish vote until they do. The camel's back is finally broken. Who knows (and who really cares) whether it was Mr. Ignatieff's straw that broke it or not?

The man is a true national treasure.