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copyright Mia T 2004 |
Lopez: You sorta defend Clinton against "wag the dog" criticisms in regard to that infamous August 1998 (Monica times) bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and some bin Laden strongholds in Afghanistan. That wasn't the problem, was it &emdash; that we fired then? |
Miniter's reasoning here is a bit weak. It is precisely the clintons' bin-Laden-emboldening inaction to the attack on the USS Cole and the clintons' bin-Laden-emboldening token, ineffectual, August 1998 missile strikes of aspirin factories and empty tents that eliminate "bin-Laden-emboldenment avoidance" as the rationale for the latter decision and support "wag the dog," instead. Taken together, feckless clinton inaction and feckless clinton action serve only to reinforce the almost universally held notion: the clinton calculus was, is, and always will be, solely self-serving. In the case of the non-response to the attack on the Cole, an unambiguous act of war, the clinton rationale, according to no less than Madeleine Albright, was a clinton Nobel Peace Prize by Arab appeasement. i.e., a clinton Nobel Peace Prize by bin-Laden-emboldenment. And in the case of the curiously-timed, ineffectual (and, therefore, bin-Laden-emboldening) token missile strikes, the clinton rationale was Lewinsky-recantation distraction -- clearly not bin-Laden-emboldenment avoidance. (This is not to say there wasn't a Nobel factor here, too. Obsolete intelligence, bolstered by the redundancy of a clinton tipoff, ensured that both bin Laden and the Mideast Muslim ego would escape unscathed.) |
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