In 1985, when Reagan was
In 1985, when Reagan was President and I was a young lad, I opened up a copy of Newsweek and was treated to a glossy color photo of a bunch of corpses splayed out in an airport in Rome. There was a lot of dark blood, and what appeared to be a substantial portion of someone's liver smeared across the floor. Terrorists had sprayed the ticket counter with automatic weapons. The action was orchestrated, the article said, by Abu Nidal. Full of rage and disgust, I typed up a letter to President Reagan and sent it off. "Why can we not apprehend this beast Nidal?" is one phrase I remember from that letter. Little did I know that, sixteen years later, I would be engulfed in a choking dustcloud and fleeing for safety as a result of actions taken by people just like Abu Nidal.
Now, Abu Nidal is dead. I'm happy about that. I'm doing a little dance.
The exact circumstances of his death are mysterious: all that's known is that his body had a bullet or two in it and was found in his home in Baghdad. The Fatah-Revolutionary Council, a group of Nidal's erstwhile terrorist buddies, says that he shot himself because he had cancer and was addicted to painkillers.
Good. I hope they're telling the truth. I hope he had cancer. And I hope that, by the end, the painkillers stopped working.
