Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Clinton and Bin Ladin (2)
There's a US Democrat full court press on right now, in case you hadn't noticed.
The aim is congressional power, the means is discrediting Bush policies (while not really committing to alternatives). The sparring vanguarders are the Clintons and Al Gore. Both sides aim for the 2008 Presidency, and erstwhile Clinton staffer Dick Morris sees an ultimate Hillary triumph as inevitable. She'll do most anything to win the prize, he says:
"(Bill Clinton is) often not a very nice person to be with in private ... (Hillary) reminds me of President Nixon. She's very ruthless."
Nixon thought so too.
Edward Klein quotes Nixon as calling Hillary "frightening" after meeting her at the White House. This was after their first formal introduction, but it was not the first time the two had come across each other:
Klein says Hillary played a major anti-Nixon role as a staffer investigating Watergate ... and yet purported to express admiration of the ex-President's methods within seconds of exchanging hellos at the Clinton White House.
We can probably presume Nixon to have been a guy whose blood didn't easily curdle. Klein intimates that it curdled after he met Hillary.
Morris predicts Hillary will be the next president. But he does not think she would make a good president:
“She’s as close to a European socialist as we have in the U.S.
“Hillary is a liberal who’s a moderate when she has to be. Bill is a moderate who’s a liberal when he has to be.
“People ask me, ‘When did you turn on the Clintons?’ I didn’t.
“I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I hate both parties equally."
In the 2008 presidential election, Morris said he believes the only two Republicans who could give Sen. Clinton a “run for her money” are Rudy Giuliani, former New York mayor, and Arizona Sen. John McCain. But:
"(T)hey're both too good,”
“I think the only person who could stop her is Al Gore,”
Interesting that Condoleeza Rice has fallen off the Morris radar as a prospective campaigner - he seemed to be singing her praises at one time. No mention either of Jeb Bush, and that also seems an astute omission.
Gore is of course conveniently positioned atop an environmental wave right now, and US Senator James Inhofe, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, believes 70% of the American public have been sucker-punched and duped by that wave.
Billary's strategy is of course to target Bush anti-terror and Iraq campaign policy.
Gore's pressure device has been the Micky Moore-style movie he stars in, while the Clintons have led with a raft of books - by themselves, Dick Clarke and now Bob Woodward.
The Woodward book is today being vamped around the usual media outlets as revealing gasp-shock-horror factoids concerning pre-911 Bush administration knowledge of Bin Ladin plots. So it's probably worth recalling, though it won't be by the Woodward peddlers, what Richard Miniter's book said about Clinton administration knowledge of Bin Ladin, as reported recently in (inter alia) The Australian:
... Thirty-eight days after Clinton was sworn in, al-Qa'ida attacked the World Trade Centre. His only public mention of the bombing was a few paragraphs stuffed into a Saturday radio address, which was devoted to an economic-stimulus package
(H)e turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI and forgot about it.
By the end of Clinton's first year, al-Qa'ida had apparently attacked twice. Al-Qa'ida attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years, climbing in lethality. :
In 1994, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched Operation Bojinka to down 11 planes simultaneously over the Pacific, killing about 3000 people. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement co-operation with the Philippines.
In 1995, al-Qa'ida detonated a 100kg car bomb outside the US military's Office of the Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.
In 1996, al-Qa'ida bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI went in.
In 1997, bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the Western world.
In 1998, al-Qa'ida simultaneously attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people including 12 American diplomats.
In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al-Qa'ida's millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman in Jordan to Los Angeles.
(!!!!APPLAUSE!!!!)
This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a National Security Council senior director who forced agencies to work together.
But the millennium approach was short-lived. Over Clarke's objections, the previous status quo quickly returned.
In October 2000, they wouldn't fail. An al-Qa'ida bomb ripped a 12sqm hole in the hull of the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39. Throughout history, an attack on an American warship has led to war, but not this time.
When Clarke presented a plan to launch a concerted cruise missile strike on al-Qa'ida and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, every member of the Clinton cabinet voted no.
... (T)he Predator drone plane, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, was grounded by bureaucratic infighting; a petty dispute with an Arizona Democratic senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators;
Clinton refused to meet his first CIA director for two years ...
***********************
I mentioned that the prospective Democrat leaders are being cagey about actually committing to policies significantly differentiated from those of Bush.
On the present Gore front, the environmental front, it is clear that the adoption of the Kyoto accord recommendations - that both the Bush and Bill Clinton administrations effectively rejected - would simultaneously be a disaster for the US economy and ineffective as a means to prevent global warming.
On the Clinton front, much is being made of unhappiness about the horror that is present-day Iraq, and the now-famous "NIE" (US National Intelligence Estimate entitled Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the US) that is said to conclude that the invasion is a mistake.
But the actual conclusion of that report regarding what to do about Iraq is rather different:
"Perceived jihad success (in Iraq) would inspire more fighters to continue the fight elsewhere." And "should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight". That's supportive, not undermining, of Bush's opposition to withdrawal.
This from Michael Costello who, unlike many commentators, has actually read the report.
Hillary can be expected to have actually read the report too.
