President Clinton acted with uncharacteristic haste and decisiveness in ordering military strikes on terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan Thursday. The political motivation for his decision will be suspect for many. But no one should doubt the need for such action, even by a beleaguered president.
Skeptics immediately attributed Clinton’s action to his desire to deflect attention from his tardy and grudging admission of wrongdoing in the Oval Office with Monica Lewinsky. The evidence is not there to support the skeptics’ allegations that Clinton ordered these strikes for his own political benefit.
But Bill Clinton has no one but himself to blame for the fact that every response he makes now to upheaval or challenge abroad will be filtered through the Lewinsky prism. He pays this price for having dragged the country through seven months of demoralizing delay and for having repeatedly ducked foreign policy challenges throughout his presidency.
In delivering the sharpest public attack on a president for having initiated hostilities abroad that I can remember, Sen. Arlen Specter (R.-Pa.) correctly contrasted the amazing speed with which Clinton acted in retaliating for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to his constant delays and moving of the goal posts in the confrontation with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Specter could have added Serbia, and perhaps North Korea, to the list.
Speaking to journalists, Specter suggested that Clinton’s actions probably aborted useful negotiations with Afghanistan and the FBI investigation of the bombings. More time and caution might have produced better results, he suggested–unpersuasively, to me at least.
The fact that Clinton has acted out of character–for whatever reason–can only be beneficial in dealing with the rogue regimes of Baghdad, Belgrade, Pyongyang and elsewhere. Seeing Clinton absorbed in scandal at home, they were no doubt gearing up to test his attention to their depredations and his resolve in deterring or punishing those acts. They may now have second thoughts.
And allies cannot now safely assume that his domestic problems would keep the United States from acting unilaterally if they fail to help.
Clinton cannot assume, however, that a single day of isolated strikes in remote places will be enough to give him credibility in unpredictability, as Richard Nixon gained with his Mad Bomber theory of international relations in the Cold War. Clinton has too actively undermined America’s standing abroad in recent months for that. Only sustained attention to challenges that he has until now minimized can overcome the problems he helped create.
His behavior in the Lewinsky case has undermined his chief aides and his foreign policy at large. He acted with a recklessness and a disregard for America’s standing in the world that is monumental and unpardonable.
His behavior has shown the president to be willing to sacrifice others with abandon, no matter who they are or what position of national trust they occupy. He has become a living Winston Smith, the George Orwell character who in the climactic scene of “1984” begs his persecutors to “Do it to Julia,” his beloved, if that means he will be spared their threat of caging him with rats.
Madeleine Albright put her credibility on the line for Clinton on Jan. 23. The secretary of state told the American public that Clinton had assured his most senior aides at a Cabinet meeting that “the allegations are completely untrue” and that she believed him. “The president is focused on what he has to do,” she said.
That unfortunately was no more true than were Clinton’s statements to his Cabinet about Monica. Albright’s testimony, as the first woman secretary of state, was particularly useful that day to Clinton’s strategy of denial and delay against charges of sexual misconduct. Albright has shown herself to be above all a loyalist to the Clintons.
As he did with Warren Christopher on Bosnia and other issues, Clinton returned loyalty by burning Albright and tarnishing her reputation–not for national gain, but for his own political viability.
This is an enormous burden to overcome, for Clinton and for U.S. foreign policy. We need to know more about the origins and effectiveness of Thursday’s raids to judge Clinton’s chances.
But we should go slow on the temptation to conclude that Clinton is once again trying to save his own skin and nothing more. The hope must be harbored that this time strong-willed members of the Cabinet can use this situation to keep Clinton focused on the national interest instead of his political viability.
