Richard Miniter uses Sunday’s dust-up between former President Bill Clinton and Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace to review the former’s record on fighting terrorists.
Bill Clinton’s outburst on Fox News was something of a public service, launching a debate about the antiterror policies of his administration. This is important because every George W. Bush policy that arouses the ire of Democrats–the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, pre-emptive war–is a departure from his predecessor. Where policies overlap–air attacks on infrastructure, secret presidential orders to kill terrorists, intelligence sharing with allies, freezing bank accounts, using police to arrest terror suspects–there is little friction. The question, then, is whether America should return to Mr. Clinton’s policies or soldier on with Mr. Bush’s.
An interesting framing, given that the consensus would probably–wrongly, in my view–lead to a return to the Clinton policies when put in this way. Violation of our basic principles, not to mention our treaty obligations, is a steep price to pay given the modest returns we’ve received to date.
Given that Miniter presumably wants readers to answer “Of course we don’t want to go back to the Clinton plan for (not) fighting terrorists,” far better to couch the debate in terms of aggressiveness abroad and general emphasis. Most of the rest of the piece does that.
With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton’s war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.
Now, this is mostly unfair. In 1993, I was in studying for a PhD specializing in American national security policy. Most of us thought the debate over humanitarian interventions was the most interesting question of the nascent post-Cold War era, not counterterrorism. Still, it is interesting in hindsight how little attention Clinton paid to the issue, at least as evidenced by the public face of his administration.
It is fair to note that this lack of emphasis persisted well after it should have been clear that we were in the middle of something big. As Miniter notes, there were al Qaeda attacks or attempted attacks on U.S. targets every year from 1993 through 2001 and they were met by little action. More importantly, as Miniter fails to note but Michael Scheuer and others constantly remind us, al Qaeda openly declared war on the United States in 1996 and again in 1998 but we did not take it seriously.
There is much more to Mr. Clinton’s record–how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy’s natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.
Arguably, we’ve learned the lesson too well, with the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction. And, surely, a President Clinton would have mounted a vigorous response to the 9/11 attacks had he been Constitutionally eligible for a third term. But the record is what it is.
UPDATE: Lydia Saad (an acquaintance of mine and longtime friend of my wife) analyzes a new Gallup survey showing that the public blames Bush more than Clinton for the failure to capture bin Laden, although both get substantial blame.
According to a recent Gallup Panel survey, the American public puts the primary blame on Bush rather than Clinton for the fact that bin Laden has not been captured. A majority of Americans say Bush is more to blame (53%), compared with 36% blaming Clinton.
Clinton’s reputation in this matter is far from unblemished, however. A separate question in the Sept. 21-24 survey measures the degree to which each president is blamed for the failure to capture or kill bin Laden. Forty-two percent of Americans believe Clinton deserves either a great deal or a fair amount of blame, while only 32% say he deserves no blame. However, a larger number, 53%, assign a great deal or fair amount of blame to Bush for failing to track down bin Laden.
Frankly, I think “capturing bin Laden” is a distraction. Certainly, though, if we’re going to assign blame, it’s not unreasonable to assign more to the guy who has had five years during which bin Laden was a household name than to the guy who had seven years when the man was mostly in obsurity. Then again, it would have been far easier to capture (or kill) him before rose to cult status in the Islamist community.
UPDATE: Steven Taylor shares my reaction to the Miniter piece, wondering “How is it that the choice has to be between the general inaction of the Clinton of the administration, and the over-reaction of the Bush administration?”
