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Date Posted: 16:29:24 06/21/03 Sat
Author: Sage
Author Host/IP: qam1c-sif-39.monroeaccess.net / 12.27.215.40
Subject: Looking elsewhere for truth Part 5
In reply to: Sage 's message, "Looking elsewhere for truth Part 4" on 16:27:24 06/21/03 Sat

Iraq: Saddam Plays Clinton

When George H. W. Bush handed the White House over to Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein was as completely under wraps as it is possible for a foreign leader of a sovereign state to be. His nation was blocked from selling oil and swarming with U.N. inspectors. Without revenue or the privacy in which to rearm, Saddam and his shattered military posed little international threat.

But when Clinton passed power to Bush's son eight years later, Iraq was frantically rearming, its coffers bulging with $40-$60 million income daily from the sale of 2 million barrels of oil. Arms inspectors were nowhere to be found, having been thrown out of the country by the Iraqi dictator. Saddam was building a war machine that would once again frighten the world with its potential for deadly weapons of mass destruction.

How did Saddam get Clinton to let him off the mat? It was like taking candy from a baby.

Each year brought a new demand from Saddam Hussein-to loosen sanctions, increase his oil revenues, curb inspectors, and, eventually, restore his complete freedom of action. His pattern repeated itself like a knitting stitch-back one, forward two.

First, Saddam would announce that he was going to refuse to honor some aspect of his agreement with the United Nations, cemented amid the ashes of his utter rout in the Gulf War of 1990-1991. Then the world would convulse in crisis. Emergency negotiations would ensue; Saddam's allies-France and Russia-would press for concessions.

Clinton would rattle his saber by bombing or sending troops to the Gulf. Then Saddam would seem to give in to U.S. demands. American foreign-policy officials would deny that they had made any concessions, and Clinton would take the bows for standing up to Saddam. Then, quietly, after the world's attention had shifted, the United States and the United Nations would grant some concession to Saddam as the previously agreed price for his keeping his past promises, all the while denying that they were ceding anything.

As long as Saddam was willing to be "humiliated" before the American public and let Clinton play the part of the tough and resolute president on the public stage, he could get away with anything-and eventually did.

Just three months after his inauguration, Iraq began to test Clinton's resolve. It plotted to kill former President Bush by exploding a car bomb during his post presidential visit to Kuwait on April 14-April 16, 1993. After two months of investigation, Clinton determined that the plot had been orchestrated by Iraq. (No!) On June 27, 1993, Clinton dispatched twenty-three Tomahawk missiles to attack the Iraqi intelligence headquarters where the plot had been hatched. Calling his response "firm and commensurate" with the offense, Clinton told the nation, "We will combat terrorism. We will deter aggression. We will protect our people."

Like schoolmates sizing each other up on opening day, the bully Saddam took his measure of the ingenue Clinton-he would bomb but not invade. Bombing, Saddam could take. You can't get removed from power by bombing, absent the unlucky hit.

Saddam had two problems when Clinton took office: He needed to lift the embargo on the sale of his oil, and he had to get rid of the U.N. inspectors so he could spend the proceeds on arms rather than on food. Throughout the Clinton administration, Saddam worked first on one end of his problem, then on the other, like a man flexing first one wrist and then the other to loosen the ropes that bind him. Saddam began by persuading Turkey to sell 12 million barrels of Iraqi oil stuck in a pipeline on its territory, resulting in $120 million in revenues to Saddam.

While noting that the Turkish plan "does have some elements" that might violate the strict ban on the sale of Iraqi oil, Western diplomats let the sale go through while Secretary of State Warren Christopher "expressed U.S. determination to resist any easing of U.N. sanctions."

As Iraq showed the world photos of its starving children, liberal and humanitarian pressure grew for easing of the sanctions throughout Clinton's first term. Saddam used the 20 million Iraqis, suffering under his boot, to strengthen his case to let him sell his oil.

When the United States and the United Nations would offer to permit oil sales under strict controls, Saddam would refuse, denouncing it as a violation of his national sovereignty. Aware that international pres-sure to drop the sanctions would grow as long as he let his people starve, Hussein held out for terms that would permit him to divert the oil revenue to rearmament.

Meanwhile, France and Russia demanded an end to all sanctions against Iraq. That put Clinton in the position of pushing to allow Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil to buy food, as an alternative to ending the sanctions.

When Saddam rejected two U.S.-British proposals in 1995-1996 to let him sell his oil under strict controls, the Iraqi dictator turned them down as an "insult" to his country's sovereignty. That sent U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali scurrying to negotiate with Saddam, seeking a way to start a flow of humanitarian aid, while the United States and the United Kingdom made a show of vigilantly scrutinizing potential deals so that Iraq could not "manipulate the oil sales agreement for its own ends," in the words of The New York Times.

So Saddam had manipulated the world into pressing him to agree to sell his oil, under a regimen that would control his use of the money, to assure that it went for food for his people. At first, Baghdad seemed to resist U.S. and British plans for restrictions on the oil-for-food program, yielding only reluctantly to international pressure for strict controls.

In reporting the deal, The Washington Post noted that "Iraq must accept stringent U.N. monitoring to ensure that the money is not used to buy weapons, luxury goods, or other items of benefit to Saddam's regime. . . . In particular, the United States and its allies insisted success-fully on U.N. supervision of the banking arrangements for oil sales, minute U.N. scrutiny of how humanitarian supplies are to be distributed, U.N. control over delivery of aid to the breakaway Kurds in northern Iraq, and widespread discretionary power for U.N. monitors."

But Saddam had already achieved the biggest part of his goal. He could sell his oil. Now he set to work on the other half of his agenda: circumventing the limitations on what he did with the money.

The so-called controls were a sham from the beginning. Iraq was allowed to sell seven hundred thousand barrels of oil daily, a total that ultimately swelled to almost 2 million (two-thirds of its pre-Gulf War total). In return, Saddam had to abide by only the loosest of actual controls over the Iraqi use of the funds it generated. The restrictions the Clinton administration negotiated largely related to peripheral aspects of the deal, rather than to the core issue of preventing the use of the bulk of the money for restoration of Iraq's military and Saddam's regime.

The safeguards included letting the United Nations choose the bank that would handle the oil transactions and reliance on U.N. statistics in determining priorities for the distribution of the aid.

But Saddam realized, as Clinton apparently did not, that oil is fungible. Once the restriction on selling Iraqi oil was lifted, nobody could be sure that the oil a nation used was "legal" (i.e., allowed under oil-for- food) or "illegal" (i.e., smuggled) oil. It all looked the same-black.

Senator Frank Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska who chaired the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, explained in 1999 how Iraqi oil ended up as arms for Saddam. "Illegally sold oil is moving by truck across the Turkish-Iraqi border. A more significant amount is moving by sea through the Persian Gulf. Exports of contraband Iraqi oil through the Gulf have jumped some fifty fold in the past two years to nearly half a billion dollars. Further, Iraq has been steadily increasing illegal exports of oil to Jordan and Turkey."

Absurdly, the national media interpreted Iraq's willingness to accept these weak restrictions on the oil sales program as evidence of restive-ness among its 20 million people. Saddam must have been feeling the heat from his starving millions at home, the media explained. But Bob Dole, Clinton's 1996 adversary, had it right. The deal gave Saddam "a source of revenue" with which to continue "his reign of terror." Piously, the administration rejected Dole's criticism, saying that the accord had "adequate safeguards against abuse."

Saddam Hussein had read Clinton like a book. He knew that oil prices had risen in 1996. He saw that the U.S. president's desire to keep them down as his reelection approached would make him accept any deal Saddam offered. Which OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) leader would forget the total disarray into which American politics was thrown by the gas lines, price hikes, and oil shortages of the 1970s, bringing down first Gerald Ford and then Jimmy Carter?

For Clinton, gas prices had a special political piquancy. It was his decision to raise the gasoline tax by a nickel in 1993 that cost him control of Congress in the midterm elections and his increase in car license fees that cost him the Arkansas governorship in 1980 after only two years in office. "Don't mess with their cars" became a political axiom in the Clinton White House.

By first allowing Saddam to sell oil and then by increasing the amount he could export, Clinton was relieving pressure on oil prices. With Republicans embarrassing him by pressing for repeal of his 1993 gas tax hike and pump prices mounting, Clinton doubtless saw the loosening of controls over Iraq as a way out of a tough political problem.

It was one thing to be able to sell oil but quite another to be able to use the money to rearm. To rebuild his military machine and to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, Saddam had to get rid of the U.N. inspectors. As The Washington Post reported, the key protection against misuse of the oil-for-food money was the provision that U.N. "officials monitoring the agreement are given full freedom to travel around Iraq."

Once the inspectors were gone, Saddam correctly reasoned, the restrictions on the use of the oil revenues would become ineffective and he could rearm in peace as he prepared for war.

Saddam started his effort to kick out the inspectors by refusing to allow them access to his dozens of presidential palaces. Then, in November 1997, Saddam announced that he was barring Americans from the U.N. inspection team, denouncing them as "spies." When the U.N. inspectors insisted on keeping U.S. representatives in the group, Iraq barred them all from carrying out their work. In response, the inspectors left Iraq altogether.

The New York Times reported that Clinton appeared to respond aggressively by sending "2 aircraft carriers and about 300 warplanes, including the latest F-117A Stealth fighters, plus a score of warships and defense units bristling with Patriot missile batteries, and 18,000 personnel," to the Gulf. In addition, "six B-52 bombers took off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for Diego Garcia, the British base in the Indian Ocean. The Pentagon said its 'air expeditionary force,' a special 32-plane combat unit previously announced as being on standby, had been ordered to proceed to the region. . . ."

The old charade-frantic negotiations followed by an apparent concession from Saddam-began again. On November 21, 1997, Sad-dam seemed to back down and allow U.N. inspectors to return, with Americans among them. In response, Clinton postured, as usual, saying: "Saddam Hussein must comply unconditionally with the will of the international community."

Shrewdly, Francis X. Clines, of The New York Times, read between the lines and speculated that the deal "was immediately followed by questions about whether Iraq might have won some secret concessions or understandings through Mr. Hussein's gambit of openly challenging the terms of his defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991."

National Security Advisor Sandy Berger defiantly answered, "There is absolutely no understanding. There's no deal. There's no concessions."

Well . . . not so fast. French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, who criticized Clinton for giving Saddam "the impression that 'there would never be a way out of the tunnel [of sanctions]' even if he got rid of all his weapons programs," noted that "the Americans bent a little" to the demands of Saddam Hussein.

In fact, Berger indicated that an increase in the allowable levels of Iraqi oil sales "might not be opposed by the Administration 'at some point,' " but he hastily added that the subject "never even came up" at the Geneva negotiations.

Six days later, Jim Hoagland pieced more of the story together in The Washington Post. Once again, Clinton was being very, very precise in his use of words in order to mislead the American people into believing that he had made no concessions to Iraq in return for the readmission of the inspection team.

Clinton was technically correct-he had made no concessions to Iraq. He made his concessions to the French and the British, "to allow him to credibly deny making any concessions to . . . Baghdad."

In fact, Clinton had agreed to expand the oil sales "if Saddam would rescind his misbehavior over the U.N. inspectors." Clinton also dropped his earlier insistence that the United States would maintain sanctions as long as Saddam was in power and,

Hoagland reported, "raised the threshold for any new U.S. effort to overthrow Saddam to the point of ruling it out," by making clear that he would not attempt to oust Saddam by covert means and that only through a massive American military campaign could the Iraqi dictator be removed from power.

Hoagland's Post article explained that the net effect of Clinton's backpedaling was that "under pressure from U.S. allies, Clinton no longer seeks an alternative to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He is willing to live with a dictator two American presidents have portrayed as a mass murderer days away from creating an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. On Iraq today, America does not rally the allies, but rallies behind them."

Some contrast with George W. Bush!

Saddam had given up nothing. In return he had gotten his oil sales revenue expanded and pocketed a U.S. guarantee against clandestine efforts to remove him from power. Now he had only to get rid of the pesky inspectors who, The New York Times reported, were getting inconveniently close to finding something, having uncovered "stores of deadly nerve agent VX and of botulinus and anthrax toxins."

Back in Iraq, the Times reported, the U.N. inspectors walked on eggshells as Iraq insisted that they "should avoid sensitive sites and property belonging to President Saddam Hussein." As the Iraqis put it, the inspectors "should avoid coming near sites which are part of Iraq's sovereignty and national security."

The week after his barring-U.S.-inspectors gambit, Saddam was back with another move. This time, he announced that he would not agree to an extension of the oil-for-food program-in effect, holding his 20 million people hostage-unless the program's restrictions were loosened. Rushing to accommodate him, U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan indicated that he would suggest raising by 50 percent the amount of oil Iraq could sell, citing reports of starvation among Iraqi children. Sad-dam now had his daily oil sales up to 1 million barrels per day, a third of his prewar total.

Finally, on November 2, 1998, Saddam Hussein dared to make his big move: He barred U.N. weapons inspectors from continuing their inspections, demanding an end to the trade embargo and a restructuring of the inspection team to reduce the American presence.

Reacting sharply, the U.N. Security Council condemned the dictator's decision and demanded that Iraq let the inspectors resume their work "immediately and unconditionally," insisting that any review of sanctions must come after proof that Iraq had disarmed.

Saddam dug in his heels, sensing the prospect of total victory, and refused to let U.N. inspectors continue to roam Iraq. The inspectors withdrew, and the world waited to see what countermeasures Clinton would order. Would he attack Iraq and demand that inspections resume?

No way. Instead President Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair tacitly conceded Saddam's ability to oust the inspectors by responding with only four days of intense bombing to protest against his action. American and British troops fired four hundred cruise missiles and two hundred aircraft strikes against Iraq, claiming that it had severely damaged Iraq's ability to produce and repair ballistic missiles, and set back its chemical and biological weapons capabilities.

Cloaking allied impotence in high-flown rhetoric, Blair labeled the new Iraq policy as "containment," stressing that he and the United States were "ready to strike again if Hussein again poses a threat to his neighbors or develops weapons of mass destruction." Blair said that ongoing allied vigilance would keep Hussein "in his cage."

Some cage! Free now to use his oil money to build whatever arms he wanted, Saddam Hussein declared victory. Crowing in a speech to his nation, he said: "You were up to the level that your leadership and brother and comrade Saddam Hussein had hoped you would be at . . .so God rewarded you and delighted your hearts with the crown of victory."

With press and media reports focusing on the intensity of the U.S. and British military strike, Saddam again let Clinton posture while he pocketed his ultimate triumph-the inspectors were gone.

The final nail in the coffin of restrictions on Iraq's oil revenues came in January 1999, when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Peter Burleigh, agreed to eliminate any limitation on Iraqi oil sales.

Nominally, this U.S. concession came to avert a proposal by France, Russia, and China to end the oil embargo altogether. But, as Murkowski put it, "The distinctions between the U.S. plan and the French plan are meaningless. This is the end of the U.N. sanctions regime."

Why Clinton Slept

What accounts for President Clinton's sorry record of weakness in the face of the three-part terrorist threat of al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea? Why was Clinton, so aggressive in domestic policy, so reluctant to move to stop terrorism?

At his core, Bill Clinton is a moral relativist. Things are not black and white to the former president; nor do they easily divide into good and evil. Whether facing partisan adversaries or foreign opponents, Clinton could always see the other side's point of view and make allowances for its conduct. Where George W. Bush sees absolutes, Clinton sees complexity.

Shakespeare's Hamlet summed up Clinton's cluttered mind well:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution,
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, there their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.
Today we call it "paralysis by analysis."

Even after 9/11, Clinton was still seeing the terrorist issue through his opaque lens. As George W. Bush was condemning terrorism as a force that must be obliterated, Clinton provided a window on his more complex and nuanced view of the subject in a speech at Georgetown University on November 7, 2001, barely two months after the attack.

Noting that terrorism "has a very long history, as long as organized combat itself," Clinton reminded his audience of what he labeled American terrorism, in an implicit reminder not to see the issue as a simple contrast of good vs. evil. He recited a genealogy of terrorism, from the Crusades through the slave trade and the treatment of Native Americans. Carrying his narrative into the present day, Clinton analogized terrorism to "hate crimes rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation." The implication was clear: We were not all good, so they could not be all evil.

For all his emphasis on values as president, Clinton was never able to see terrorism as a threat apart from the normal course of international relations. Clinton would not delineate between terrorism and war, nor would he ascribe a motivation as simple as evil to the actions of the other side.

Some who know Clinton well ascribe this lack of dichotomy in his thinking to his relationship with his alcoholic stepfather. Former White House aide Bill Curry has noted that children of alcoholics tend to be lax in reminding their parents of their promises for fear of setting off an alcoholic rage. "I can imagine Bill Clinton's father starting off the day by promising to take him to the movies that evening, only to forget his promise amid his nighttime drinking. Billy would be loathe to remind his dad of the commitment lest he trigger a searing outburst."

In his private dealings, Clinton rarely enforced promises and never saw the transgressions of his staff as grounds for dismissal. Everything was relative. He tolerated an amazing degree of disobedience, disloyalty, conflicts of interest, and untruthfulness in both friend and foe, per-haps accounting for his own tendency to lie and obfuscate. At times it seemed as if the truth had no inherent advantage to recommend itself, but only its relative merit as a practical way to achieve a desired out-come.

While frequently furious at petty slights, Clinton never correlated his anger with policy making. Deliberately, even proudly, Clinton would purge himself of any vestige of rage when he made up his mind to pursue a certain course of action-even when the issues at hand were out-rages such as the bombings of the World Trade Center, our African embassies, or American military barracks in Saudi Arabia. Faced with a choice between anger at the perpetrator and empathy for the victim, he always gave emotional priority to the latter.

By contrast, George W. Bush seems to carry a modulated and matured anger into his programmatic deliberations about terrorism and to be unafraid to use it as the basis for making policy. He seems capable of converting the energy of anger into a fuel for decisive action.

Clinton's tendency to moral relativism also handicapped his ability to set proper priorities. Apart from the need to be reelected-and also perhaps to cover up his sexual misconduct-nothing else enjoyed absolute priority in his mind. Terrorism was important, but so were relations with our European allies, civil liberties, budgetary constraints, the price of oil, the starvation of the Iraqi and North Korean peoples, and a host of other considerations, some worthy and others base. Everything was judged in its relation to everything else. Where Bush assigns absolute priority to fighting the war on terror, Clinton could never give anything such unique emphasis.

Nor were Clinton's foreign-policy advisers much better. With the sole exception of Richard Holbrooke, they were an elitist crew deter-mined to keep foreign policy in the hands of professionals. Even such amateurs as former trade lawyer Sandy Berger, Clinton's second-term National Security Advisor, were admitted to the exclusive club of foreign-affairs gurus only if they shed themselves of their tendency to be unduly influenced by the emotions of the common people in the formulation of American foreign policy.

While voters identified terrorism, Iraq, and North Korea as their top foreign-affairs concerns, diplomats like Warren Christopher and Tony Lake were determined to keep things in what they regarded as the proper perspective. They deeply distrusted any excessive zeal in prosecuting Iraq, North Korea, or even al Qaeda as pandering to electoral needs.

Uppermost in their minds was the need to preserve international cohesion in approaching these issues, particularly in our dealings with Iraq. The pro-Iraqi inclinations of the French and the Russians had to be factored in when determining Washington's policy. When Clinton ventured to make his policy of sterner stuff, the threat of a press leak that Clinton was "demagoguing" the issue was enough to hold him in check.

So limited was Clinton's confidence about summoning national resolve for the use of force where there was any real risk of casualties that he always knuckled under in the face of cautious advice from the experts.

My first brush with the arrogance of his foreign-affairs people came as I helped the president prepare his Memorial Day remarks to be delivered at Arlington Cemetery in 1995. I had prepared a draft speech that branded Iraq, Iran, and other nations as international outlaws, linking them to our prior adversaries the Nazis and the Communists. But I was confronted with an angry aide from the Pentagon who told me, bluntly, that if I persisted in pushing my speech draft there would be press leaks that Clinton's political aides were attempting to interfere with the president's remarks on this solemn day of national consecration. Scared off by the threat, Clinton killed my speech draft.

Daunted by a fear that his foreign policy would be perceived as "political," Clinton instructed me never to offer him advice on foreign or military policy matters unless we were alone. Indeed, every week at our strategy meetings in the East Wing, I would bide my time at the end of the meeting until the room was emptied of the others who attended so that I could then sit with Clinton for an hour more discussing inter-national issues. When Sandy Berger, wise to my habits, sought to stay longer to keep me away from Clinton, the president instructed me to pretend to leave the building, then wait downstairs for his all-clear signal so that we could begin our foreign-policy conversation.

When Clinton decided to send ground troops to Bosnia to enforce the peacekeeping deal he had secured after bombing the Serb forces, his foreign-policy advisers insisted that he explain his decision as a move to shore up the NATO alliance. When my polls showed that the public could care less about NATO but was focused instead on preventing more murders and rapes by Bosnian Serb forces, Lake and his aides resisted raising the issue for fear that it would be "pandering" to popular prejudice.

Between the ever-shifting foreign-policy priorities of Tony Lake and Warren Christopher, which blocked decisive action against Iraq and North Korea, and the civil liberties worries of Janet Reno and George Stephanopoulos, which inhibited efforts to stop domestic terror, it seemed as if the entire White House was focused on keeping the president from acting clearly and forcefully to deal with terrorism.

However, none of their efforts would have succeeded but for the fears, worries, and phobias that raged inside Bill Clinton's mind: fear that if he led American troops into a battle with casualties, his own draft record would return to bite him politically; worry that he would alienate his Hispanic constituency if he cracked down on illegal aliens; concern that an increase in the price of oil could spell his political doom; hesitation in the face of European intransigence and worry that his own foreign-policy experts would leak that he was incompetent and too political; willingness to believe he had a deal with North Korea when all he had was a vague and misleading statement of intentions; unwillingness to go to war with Saddam Hussein; trepidation that civil libertarian criticism would undermine his domestic support; and, finally, a morally relativist refusal to see Saddam, al Qaeda, or Kim Jong Il as forces of evil.

These factors, more than any advice from his advisers, paralyzed Bill Clinton's efforts to stem the forces of terror.

By the second half of Clinton's second term, it was too late to focus on terrorism with the intensity the issue required. Disgraced by the Lewinsky scandal, distrusted for lying about his relationship with the intern, hounded by the Republicans during impeachment, Bill Clinton lacked the political and moral authority to stand up to international terror.

Not that he wanted to. As 1998, 1999, and then 2000 brought more and more evidence of an international terrorist conspiracy against America, he became more obsessed with his twin political goals: surviving impeachment and putting his wife in the U.S. Senate.

The White House became a campaign headquarters for Hillary. Bill Clinton had the worst of both worlds-the eroded power of a lame-duck president about to leave office and the timidity of a man focused on the next election. Would an invasion of Afghanistan with ground troops backfire? Was there enough support to pull it off? Would his critics say he was "wagging the dog"-using a war to regain his political footing? Were these risks worth taking as his wife was beginning her political career? No way.

And so Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong Il lived to fight again another day-against a tougher president.

When Henry Kissinger asked Chinese foreign minister Chou En-Lai what he thought about the French Revolution of 1789, the Communist replied, "It's too soon to tell." We err when we judge a president too quickly after he leaves office. It is only in the hindsight of subsequent events that we understand the wisdom or the folly of his actions.

The success of the containment doctrine in bringing down the Soviet Union gave Harry Truman a vindication that was fifty years in coming.

Vietnam fell, and no other domino keeled over. Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines-all supposed further casualties of a failure to stop communism in Vietnam-survived our defeat just fine. And when Soviet communism fell fifteen years later, the folly of John-son's and Nixon's obsessions with Vietnam became apparent to all.

As the 1980s recede into history, Ronald Reagan's efforts to free the economy of government constraints seems wiser and wiser. Japan and Germany, the poster children for planned economies, stagnate, but Reagan's America keeps growing.

Bill Clinton looked a lot better in the White House than he does in the years since. We assumed that he had North Korea under control. He didn't. We let Clinton distract us from Saddam's warlike preparations. We shouldn't have. And we didn't give Osama bin Laden much thought. Big mistake.

In hindsight, Clinton left us naked and unprepared for the perils of terrorism.

For all Clinton's accomplishments (welfare reform, crime reduction, the balanced budget, prosperity, and freer trade), and for all his failures (impeachment, Lewinsky, Paula Jones, the FBI files, Whitewater, and the pardons), it may well be his failure to fight terrorism that will dominate his legacy.

And it should.

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