Bill Clinton's Sins Of Omission

"Early in the Clinton administration, it would have been comparatively easy to smash bin Laden's emerging network. Instead the arch-terrorist's strength, reach, and lethality were allowed to relentlessly build over the course of the eight Clinton years" - Richard Miniter

It's impossible to adequately comprehend the whys and wherefores of this current "war on terror" until one grapples with the blatant mistakes of the Clinton years. And that is precisely what investigative journalist Richard Miniter has accomplished in his bestseller entitled, "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror". Miniter is well equipped to examine the subject at hand, having been "a member of the award-winning Sunday Times (of London) team whose four-part series traced the secret war between Clinton and bin Laden". He's also written for a variety of topnotch publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and National Review.

The author's "on the record" interviews were from an impressive array of former Clinton administration officials including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Advisors Tony Lake and Sandy Berger, Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke, CIA Director James Woolsey, current CIA Director George Tenet, and Clinton pollster and political advisor Dick Morris. Miniter also spoke with myriad bureaucrats, terrorism experts and politicos such as Senator Richard Shelby, Congressman Bill McCollum, Ambassador Tim Carney, Ambassador Joe Wilson, CIA Station Chiefs Milt Bearden and Bill Piekney, scholars Michael Ledeen and Laurie Mylroie, international businessman Mansoor Ijaz, and others too numerous to cite here. All-in-all, Miniter produced an exceptionally well documented tome.

Miniter's treatise is nothing less than stunning as he methodically exposes Osama bin Laden's dirty little fingerprints on a host of terror assaults that specifically targeted American citizens and assets, both here and abroad, throughout the 1990s. Clinton's inability to effectively tackle bin Laden time and time again is bound to leave many readers emotionally exhausted. The key question is this -- Could Clinton have averted September 11th? The answer is probably, if he had the wherewithal to respond to terror attacks as a national security threat. Mind you, that would have required Clinton to conceptualize al-Qaeda strikes as "warfare" rather than criminal acts that constitute a "law enforcement" matter. However, Clinton was not up to the challenge. He was not a president who successfully embraced the role of "commander-in-chief", and that made all the difference. Miniter indicates that Clinton "was addicted to cautious half-measures and perhaps a lingering distrust of the US military".

As Edmund Burke averred, "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." I don't doubt for a second that Bill Clinton wanted only to bring his personal best to the presidency. But given Clinton's limitations, he was bound to experience difficulties in a wartime milieu. Author Richard Miniter found that because of Clinton's personal foibles and character flaws, he was reluctant to take political risks and often exhibited paralysis in decision making. Therefore, "Clinton responded [to terrorism] only with brave words, empty gestures, meaningless cruise-missile strikes, and halfhearted covert operations". Certainly, this is in direct contrast to the ways of President Bush, who is well capable of decisive action.

During the Clinton presidency, Osama bin Laden publicly declared war on America and western civilization on several occasions. In the decade leading-up to 9/11/01, al-Qaeda and its affiliates made good on their threats against America as illustrated by the following episodes of terrorism examined in Miniter's book: The assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in NYC (1990), The Goldmore and Aden Hotels in Yemen (1992), the Twin Towers, NYC (1993), the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia (1993), the Saudi National Guard office in Riyadh, which employed about 100 Americans (1994), Project Bojinka, which plotted to bring down American commercial aircraft, and severely damaged a Philippine Airlines aircraft, killing one, in a "practice run" (1995), the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), and the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen (2000).

Chapter Six of Miniter's book entitled, "The Friend of Bill", was rather interesting if you're a fan of cable's Fox News Channel and appreciate the commentary of terrorism expert Mansoor Ijaz,

So true. I saw a clip this morning of one of Hillary's petty in pink appearances over the weekend. She stated that President Bush was undoing "everything we accomplished." Of course, her accomplices in the media would never ask her about "their" inactions toward terrorism.

This forgets a couple of inconvenient facts: One is that Clinton ran on a platform of minimizing overseas adventuring, in distinction to Old Bush whose administration had, first, tacitly encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait, then drummed up a war machine to "rescue" Kuwait, and finally launched a blitzkrieg against Iraq, which, despite considerable damage to Iraq's infrastructure, failed to remove Saddam and also failed to make Kuwait one ounce more democratic.

Another is that the same wonderful CIA intelligence which so far has failed to locate either Osama or Saddam, was no better ten years ago and Clinton dropping bombs where the CIA thought Osama could be found would probably have had disasterous results. Remember when Clinton, using CIA info, bombed a supposed Osama bomb factory .... which turned out to be an aspirin factory, and the Republicans never let up on him about that.

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