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Don’t Put The Blame On Clinton

The Washington Post has an article by a former Clinton deputy chief of staff: Don’t Put The Blame On Clinton (washingtonpost.com)

This was in response to Charles Krauthammer blaming Clinton for, well, everything that’s gone wrong with the world.

The Clinton Administration inherited a number of problems from the former Bush Administration, but didn’t spend the first two years complaining about it, unlike some on the Right. Instead, while US foreign policy was somewhat ad hoc, it was relatively successful in the 1990s:

  • Iraq: Clinton-era containment weakened Iraq such that the current Bush Administration foresees using only a quarter of the force from the first Gulf War to accomplish more a more ambitious task.
  • North Korea: practical foreign policy actions led to a deal that stopped DPRK nuclear production until last year. In comparison, the current Bush Administrations policy appears to be a mixture of petulance and impracticality.

  • The Balkans: the world is a better place after the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.

  • Terrorism: the Clinton Administration made terrorism a national priority in the late 1990s. A number of domestic plots — the bombing of the millennium celebrations, LAX, the UN, etc. — were foiled during this time. The Republicans were more interested in point scoring over Lewinsky than military action in Afghanistan.

    • There are a number of other points, such as unrest in Haiti, instability in Russia, etc. When all is said and done, “America and the world were better prepared and able to meet each of these challenges at the end of the Clinton administration than at the beginning.”

    The author doesn’t note that plans for military action in Afghanistan were drafted by the Clinton Administration, but not implemented because there was no domestic support for anything of that scale. As a stop-gap, Clinton permanently kept a submarine in the Indian ocean, ready to strike if Osama bin Laden’s location were confirmed.

    There are a couple of historical what-ifs here: what if no Lewinsky, or, rather, what if Clinton could keep his appetite under control? And, of course, what if Rice et. al. had taken the Clinton war plans seriously?

    Posted on Tuesday, February 25th, 2003 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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