W A S H I N G T O N, Nov. 13 — The high school textbooks say the president of the United States runs the executive branch of government and rides herd on a vast bureaucracy assigned to carry out his directives.
Well, that's not quite the way it works, say Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who describe the travails of President Clinton in trying, often unsuccessfully, to get the Pentagon and the FBI to pursue Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.
The two authors, both Clinton-era National Security Council experts on terrorism, share their thoughts in a new book, "The Age of Sacred Terror." They say Clinton wanted to do something about al-Qaida operations in Afghanistan late in his second term, his cruise missile attacks on the group's facilities in August 1998 having achieved little.
He approached Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said, according to the book, "It would scare the (expletive) out of al-Qaida if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters in to the middle of their camp. It would get us an enormous deterrence and show those guys we're not afraid."
full story, ABC News. Oh please! Hey, Bill, why didn't you contact your Hollywood friends and see if Jackie Chan was available? I bet he could have scared the $#*! out of Osama. What a load of tripe!
That statement proves that the toon knew bin Laden thought we were cowards after the Black Hawk incident.
The Pentagon feared a debacle similar to April 1980 when President Carter dispatched helicopters to Iran in hopes of rescuing 52 American hostages. The result was the incineration of two helicopters and the deaths of eight servicemen.
Uh yeah, they feared an ingorant boob giving orders to the military.
The authors suspect that Pentagon reservations about the Clinton plan ran deeper. The Pentagon, they point out, had an uneasy relationship with Clinton virtually from Day 1, when the White House began pushing to end discrimination against homosexuals by the military.
Not buying that, more likey they knew he was a worthless CIC.
They quoted a senior political appointee at the Pentagon as saying that Defense was "particularly unwilling to go out on a limb for Clinton."
And why should they, when they asked for help in Mogadishu, they got sqaut.
Also, the authors say, Thomas Pickering, No. 3 at the State Department under Clinton, worried that someone at Defense would put out the story that the Clinton plan would "hazard the lives of young Americans in a wild goose chase. The Pentagon has a great capacity to let things leak to keep from doing them."
Clinton's "black ninja" plan never got off the ground.
And thank God! It probably saved countless military lives.
Lee Edwards, who follows presidential politics at the Heritage Foundation, says all presidents have had difficulty with balky bureaucracies.
He recalled that President Truman, shortly before Dwight D. Eisenhower's succession in 1953, said, "Poor Ike. He's going to come in, give an order and think it's going to be carried out."
Interesting how GWB doesn't seem to have these problems.
We survived that toon by the skin of our teeth!