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What warning? That's what head-scratching Bush-administration officials were wondering after Bill Clinton said a week or so ago that he had warned incoming President George W. Bush about the threat from Osama bin Laden. According to Clinton's account, he tried to convince Bush to abandon his other national-security priorities to focus on al Qaeda during an "exit interview" with the newly elected president. "In his campaign, Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and national missile defense," Clinton remarked. "I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden." Clinton maintained that his inability to budge Bush was "one of the two or three of the biggest disappointments that I had." This is almost certainly a lie. A Bush official familiar with the meeting and its content says it focused on other foreign and domestic matters. According to the official, if al Qaeda came up at all, it was in passing as President Clinton lobbied Bush on other matters, most importantly North Korea. Clinton thought it was crucial that Bush maintain his administration's soft-touch approach to North Korea even though -- as we would learn soon enough -- Pyongyang had already made a mockery of Clinton's 1994 Agreed Framework by starting a secret nuclear program. Clinton also made pleas for his pet domestic programs. The Clinton misstatement of his posture in that "exit interview" is part of the attempted revisionism by the Clinton team of its terrorism record (which I dissect in my new book Legacy). This effort reached its previous height in a Time magazine cover story in August 2002 that reported that there was a Clinton "plan" to fight al Qaeda that was passed along to the Bush team. This too proved false. A former Clinton official told NR's Byron York after the Time report: "It was certainly not a formal war plan. We wouldn't have characterized it as a formal war plan." In testimony before Congress, former Clinton national-security adviser Sandy Berger said the same thing: "There was no war plan that we turned over to the Bush administration during the transition. And the reports of that are just incorrect." In any case, Clinton's "plan" now is to find every opportunity to try to divert attention from his failures in the war on terror. Consider yourself warned . . . Rich Lowry |
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- Mia T, 2.14.04
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WHEN TO BOMB  (viewing movie requires Flash Player 6, available HERE)
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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. (I will have more to say on this as it relates to the Gorelick memo.) In the case of the non-response to the attack on the Cole, an unam biguous 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.) |
initer's reasoning here is a bit weak.
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ADDENDUM 12.13.03:
