Former President Bill Clinton is in the news. He's busy pushing his Clinton Global Initiative, a project to get lots of rich people to donate lots of money in order to make everything better for everyone everywhere. At least, that's what it seems to be. He had a sit down with Chris Wallace for Fox News Sunday and ... lost his cool. The topic of discussion turned to efforts to get Osama Bin Laden in the 1990's, and defensive anger reared up like he'd been accused of ... things he's already been accused of. You can see a snippet of video here, and there's a partial transcript here. The show airs tomorrow.
I'm simply going to repeat what I wrote regarding the controversy over The Path To 9/11.
The truth is that no one - no one at all - from Reagan through Bush 43, including Bush 41 and Clinton, took terrorism seriously enough until 9-11. That includes Mr. Bush's father, whose response to the December 21, 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, with which I am unfortunately intimately familiar, was an inadequate legalistic approach to find and try the killers rather than to hold the state sponsor responsible and treat the attack as an act of war, as it was. That attitude was carried forward by Mr. Clinton.
Only after 9-11 did the government change it's approach, and for that Mr. Bush is to be credited. Those who point out that the current struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan only create more terrorists miss the point. The previous approach, via arrests and trials, only tried to pick off the terrorists one by one after these terrorists had succeeded. That is not vigorous enough a defense of the American people, as 9-11 showed.
Particularly feckless were Mr. Carter's four years. He was really the first to back down, in the Iraninan Hostage Crisis. You could, perhaps, even go back to Munich in 1972, when kidnapping and murdering Israeli athletes on German soil didn't lead to any international resolve against such terrorist acts.
Mr. Clinton, however, would like us to believe he did more, he worked harder, and he took it much more seriously than the facts suggest, particularly in "getting" Bin Laden. He'd certainly like to be known as the President that took terrorism most seriously. Well, sir, you had eight years after the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, and your administration didn't get it done. You may as well stop trying to create a superhero myth for your entry in future textbooks. History will not look at your presidency as that of a successful terror warrior. There were far too many failures to respond aggressively in your eight years. It matters little what you say you did to "get" Bin Laden; it didn't work. Your policy was to treat these attacks as criminal rather than as acts of war, and that was a mistake.
9/24/06 0710: You can add this article from the Washington Post, circa 2004, hat tip Ace, two the two I found above.
The compromise wording, in a succession of bin Laden-focused memos, always expressed some ambiguity about how and when deadly force could be used in an operation designed to take bin Laden into custody. Typical language, recalled one official involved, instructed the CIA to "apprehend with lethal force as authorized."
At the CIA, officers and supervisors agonized over these abstract phrases. They worried that if an operation in Afghanistan went badly, they would be accused of having acted outside the memo's scope. Over time, recriminations grew between the CIA and the White House.
It was common in Clinton's cabinet and among his National Security Council aides to see the CIA as too cautious, paralyzed by fears of legal and political risks. At Langley, this criticism rankled. The CIA's senior managers believed officials at the White House wanted to have it both ways: They liked to blame the agency for its supposed lack of aggression, yet they sent over classified legal memos full of wiggle words.
[...]
But Clinton also authorized the CIA to carry out operations that legally required the agency's officers to plan in almost every instance to capture bin Laden alive and bring him to the United States to face trial.
This meant the CIA officers had to arrange in advance for detention facilities, extraction flights and other contingencies -- even if they expected that bin Laden would probably die in the arrest attempt. These requirements made operational planning much more cumbersome, the CIA officers contended.
In fashioning this sensitive policy in the midst of an impeachment crisis that lasted into early 1999, Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, struggled to forge a consensus within the White House national security team. Among other things, he had to keep on board a skeptical Attorney General Janet Reno and her Justice Department colleagues, who were deeply invested in law enforcement approaches to terrorism, according to senior officials involved.
"Deeply invested in law enforcement approaches to terrorism," indeed.
