The Clinton Legacy

I’ve been thinking more about the Clinton/Chris Wallace blow-up. While I don’t think that there’s any use in trying to ‘pin the blame’ on any one person (since there is plenty of actions that went around in those years that all led up to 9/11 and since), I’m certainly not for leaving the record muddied. I know there are many who think that the explosion was planned in order to embolden the Democratic base, to show Democratic politicians to be tough on national security, or to belittle Fox News. If any of that is true, then Clinton is nothing more than a poser. Some think that Clinton is so concerned about his ‘legacy’ that he can’t stand anything that might tarnish it. If that’s true, then I fear it’s a little too late for him.

It’s only an uneducated guess, but I think the real reason that Clinton got so mad is because he feels guilty about everything that has happened. I’m sure that he would have acted more aggressively if a specific threat to hijack multiple airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center was known, and it was clear that the death of Bin Laden would prevent it. But no one really knows if Bin Laden’s death would have stopped 9/11. And the President rarely gets a ’cause and effect’ scenario laid out so perfectly, making it obvious what to do next. That’s why they get ‘paid the big bucks’. Bin Laden did not pilot the boat when the Cole was attacked. He did not pull the trigger himself. It wasn’t 100% sure that he was inside a building at a particular hour and the Air Force could not guarantee 100% that the mosque next door wouldn’t have any damage when the cruise missile flew in. Maybe some in the Middle East would denounce us if we took the opportunity to grab him up when he was being kicked out of Sudan. No wonder there was so much angst, and the bar set so high that it prevented action at the time. No one could make things 100% sure. Now in hindsight it looks those might have been some of the best chances to eliminate bin Laden’s threat. “I tried…” (But, if only I’d known then when I know now…)

Not that he needs any council from me, but I don’t think Clinton can worry about that now - it’s in the past. He is not to be sainted and Bush should not be bedeviled. We must all admit that the US did some things and failed to do others… that’s just how we came to arrive on the that day on 9/11. Do I wish that it had worked out differently? Of course. Does Clinton? I’d wager that he does as well.

When Clinton started pointing and jabbing his finger in Chris Wallace’s lap, he did directly invite everyone to take a closer look at his claims and all that is publicly known. A most-excellent recap summary is available today at Newsbusters: The Bin Laden’s-Still-Alive Blame Game. Maybe this explains a little about how we got here as well:

Maybe this was to be expected given the utter failure of the 9/11 Commission to dispassionately look at all of the information that was available to it, and give the nation an honest and nonpartisan assessment of what truly happened in the years leading up to the attacks.
Instead, what we received was a purely political report that tap-danced around specifics to protect both presidential Administrations involved from embarrassment. As a result, we ended up with more questions than answers, wasting a lot of time and taxpayer money in the process.

I think that the problem is that we are still too close to the event to expect that a political body could possibly look dispassionately at the situation. And with all of the leaks and in-fighting, are our intelligence agencies and government administrative bodies also unable to dispassionately assess the current situation? I’m not so sure that they can. I don’t care if you are Republican or Democrat, pro- or anti- war, etc. — if you feel the need to leak top secret material in order to support a cause, then you don’t belong in the intelligence services. Period.

This battle is over much more than the legacy of either George Bush or Bill Clinton, or the number of seats in Congress held by their respective political parties.

The Good Old Days

If I’m feeling especially cynical, I’m tempted to think that this is the 1970’s again. You know, the “good old days” when it was “us vs. them” with the Soviet Union. The Vietnam War fresh in everyone’s minds, especially the Baby Boomers.

Don’t we all sometimes wish we could go back in time to when we were young and invincible? When we weren’t burdened with knowing too much, so it seemed easier to go off on quixotic quests? At that age you feel smarter than all of those ‘old men’ and couldn’t be more convinced that whatever path you are on is the right one.

Anyway, I think it would be fair to say that the mid/late-1970’s was not a time of optimism in the United States. We ended up with Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy which seemed to be saying that the Soviet Union was just impossible to overcome. This was as good as it could get. We should unilaterally disarm (give up). Maybe we could just find a way to coexist. Of course, if anyone gets out of line, let’s keep our athlete’s home from the Olympics in protest! And really, maybe they are not so bad after all if we could just come to understand them. After all, we had been provoking them since the Second World War.

Were things safer using that kind strategy? Maybe… if you use the definition of ’safe’ that means ‘less risky’. For the moment.

When all we shoot for is the status quo, the arrow doesn’t get very far.

Is that what those who want a quick exit from Iraq are suggesting? Behind all of the bluster of “Bush lied” and stripping away all of the denouncements of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeldt… what is there? Is it that same feeling that the ‘Islamic condition’ is just impossible to overcome? Is this as good as it can get? Should we unilaterally disarm? Should we just hope that we can find a way to coexist? Maybe we can figure out what we’ve done to rile them, and then keep our heads down and maybe they’ll leave us alone? Maybe we deserve exactly what we’re getting?

I would ask those who think this way to think about it again. It wasn’t true about the Soviet Union, and it’s not true now.

I don’t know if the government of the Soviet Union have collapsed by itself if it hadn’t been for Ronald Reagan. But I think it’s a safe bet that it wasn’t “status quo” that would have done it. Has it been perfect in the lands of the ex-Soviet Union since the collapse? Not by a long shot. Pretty dang risky. But people have got a taste of something pretty special: freedoms.

The Devil Made Me Do It

Other than as a standard election-time stunt, the NIE nonsense seemed to be focused on retelling one of the big lies: the United States deserves terrorism because we are doing [insert whatever your cause is here]. Maybe you’d like to fill-in-the-blank with the Iraq war, or support of Israel, or that the US drives the world’s economy, or that we went to Kosovo without a UN resolution, or that you prefer corrupt dictators who invade their neighbors and *really* torture their own people but who are able to provide Oil-for-Food kickbacks, or the fact that we don’t immediately turn our treasury over to a socialist “one-world” government so that peace and joy can fill the Earth, or failure to sign the Kyoto treaty, or that George W. Bush is the sulfur-scented devil incarnate.

What did we do to deserve this terrorist reaction? Are we really doing things that make people like us less?

Let me say this: It’s kind of like thinking that the US is wearing a skirt that’s too short, inviting ourselves to be attacked. We are not making people into jihadists. Just because some people may use our actions as an excuse to try to recruit people to their twisted cause… well, they would find something else to “fill-in-the-blank” with if we try to take away one reason. Because that’s still their cause. House of Eratosthenes is right on:

The problem I’m really having with it, is that if you are a jihadist, you are a nut. Well, I grew up in Bellingham, Washington; I know nuts don’t have to be “stoked.” If you’re a nut, by definition, your gears are already stripped. I say that because of the plain insanity of what you are planning to do. That you would follow through on it, says far more about you than it does about whatever motivated you.

And I frankly don’t care how many people fall into that class. Targeting civilians to make a point, is nuts.

A guy on the radio put it the best way I’ve heard so far: You are never in more danger of being stung by hornets, than when you knock the hornet’s nest down. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

We tried leaving the hornet’s nest up. We tried it. We know where it gets us.

Hornets get pretty pissed when their nest is knocked down. That shouldn’t provide us with an argument for leaving the nest up. What it should do, is make us more and more grateful to the men and women who are closest to the nest — and the leaders who made the decision to knock it down. That would qualify us for the definition I have in mind for the word “civilization.”

Nuance

We’ve been lectured so much in the last couple of years about nuance, although it’s usually mentioned as a concept that only the intellectually superior are capable of comprehending (”intellectually superior” is defined as “someone who is not George W. Bush and his neocon cabal”). As I am just a simple man, I will not pretend to be an expert in nuance.

But I have heard a distressing number of people who are twisting things. For example, a blogger named Dean Esmay recently ranted at Michelle Malkin and others. The arguments from him and few others seem to be: (a) Not all Muslims are terrorists but ‘right-wing’ bloggers want to destroy all Muslims, or else (b) By acknowledging that ‘fundamentalist’ Islam is not very free, ‘right-wingers’ mean to declare war on Muslims throughout the world. Not very nuanced… I know.

On the surface, these arguments purport to expose some religious intolerance. But, in addition to being mischaracterizations of most bloggers’ positions completely, the arguments don’t make a lick of sense. Of course all people of the Muslim faith do not ascribe to all of the same beliefs or practices. Neither so all Christians, nor all Jews. Nor do I suspect do all agnostics, nor atheists. That’s one of the reason’s why George Bush referred to “Islamic Fascists” to differentiate between those who want to destroy in the name of Islam, and all he got in return was a nasty press release from CAIR saying that he was promoting “hostility to Islam and the American-Muslim community”. And which side in the “Radical Islam” vs. “the West” is taking an intolerant view of religion? It’s those same fascists who see no distinction between government and religion and seek to both destroy non-believers as well as to install governments to enforce a single religious viewpoint.

I’m sorry, but those people who sit around worrying that we are compromising the idea of ’separation of church and state’ by letting a Cub Scout den use a room in a government school should look up at some real examples of the mixture of government-sponsored religious tactics.

With respect to declarations of war, look no further than the latest from Al Qaeda encouraging the kidnapping of Westerners in order to try to blackmail for the release of terrorists and the recruitment of nuclear scientists and explosives experts to participate in their ‘holy war’. The relationship with Iraq? “The field of jihad can satisfy your scientific ambitions, and the large American bases [in Iraq] are good places to test your unconventional weapons, whether biological or dirty, as they call them.”

Is Islam fundamentally anti-West? If you want a good scorecard of some of the things that should concern our more liberal friends, the Independent Conservative has a much better rundown than I could put together. But far from being a religious battle, the actions in the Middle East are about defeating facism, not religon. The antidote to the radicalism is not easy to give. It requires exposing the people to freedoms. For many in the region, these freedoms are things that neither they nor their parents nor their grandparents may have ever experienced. This is not easy. This is not without risk. This is not safe. And it means that some who have spent their lives entrenched in power may not stay in power. And you can bet they will fight very hard to keep that from happening.

This very well may be an ‘inflection point’ in history. The status quo just doesn’t work at times like that.

Just because it’s not safe, doesn’t mean we can afford not to take the side of freedom. Maybe that’s more risky. Maybe it’s more scary. Maybe that will even make some people mad at us. Maybe we will be wounded again before this battle is over. But it’s the right thing to do.