When Clinton Hit Back

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"What we're doing is sending a message against the people who were responsible for planning this operation. ... [If] anybody asks the same people to do it again, they will remember this message."

Secretary of Defense Les Aspin
Washington Post
June 1993

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Believe it or not, there was a time — not so long ago — when American presidents wouldn't hesitate to act if a single American was threatened, much less actually injured or killed.

Such a case occurred 20 years ago today.

To put it in context: A couple of months earlier, former President George H.W. Bush — the man Bill Clinton had beaten in the previous year's presidential election — was in Kuwait to commemorate the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War. Seventeen people were arrested and charged with conspiring to kill Bush with explosives that were hidden in a vehicle.

No explosions occurred. No one was hurt. But Clinton was convinced, largely because of information gathered and analyzed by American foreign and domestic intelligence operatives, that the plot originated in Iraq — and 20 years ago today, he used American military might for the first time, ordering nearly two dozen cruise missile strikes on Iraqi intelligence facilities.

The strikes were meant both as retaliation for the plot and warning not to attempt anything like it again. But Clinton didn't shoot first and ask questions afterward. He explored numerous options, even those he felt did not go far enough. Eventually he selected one on the recommendation of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I felt we would have been justified in hitting Iraq harder," Clinton wrote in his presidential memoirs, "but [Colin] Powell made a persuasive case that the attack would deter further Iraqi terrorism and that dropping bombs on more targets, including presidential palaces, would have been unlikely to kill Saddam Hussein and almost certain to kill more innocent people."

Most of the missiles hit their intended targets, but a few overshot, and eight civilians were killed.

"It was a stark reminder," Clinton wrote, "that no matter how careful the planning and how accurate the weapons, when that kind of firepower is unleashed, there are usually unintended consequences."

The occasion of this anniversary has led me to think about two recent events that tell me much of what I need to know about U.S. policy in the 21st century.

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First, the evasive stance taken by Barack Obama and the members of his administration after the deadly attacks on the embassy in Benghazi last year tells me the executive branch is not willing to stand up for Americans abroad, be they dead or alive — unless there are clear benefits in doing so.

Second, Obama's recent argument in a speech at the National Defense University that the war on terror must end as all wars do shows a staggering naivete. Rhetorically, it sounds good, but the problem is that the war on terror is not a conventional war with armies and generals. It cannot be resolved in conventional ways — if, in fact, it can be resolved at all.

When you are dealing with terrorists, you are not dealing with anything as organized or concentrated as a single army or nation. Your enemies could be from anywhere on the globe — including your own back yard — and as long as even one is on the loose, so is the danger.

Sympathizers with the opposition have always been around — there were Nazi and Japanese sympathizers in America during World War II — but they weren't generally viewed as combatants unless they took some kind of aggressive action.

By the very nature of their activities, terrorists must be regarded — automatically — as combatants.

The idea that America can arbitrarily declare the war on terror over is as imperialistic as any I have heard, and it tells terrorists around the world, OK, we're going back to sleep now. It harkens back to a time when the prevailing attitude was that we were always in the right; therefore, we were entitled to impose our will on others. We — and only we — could decide when a war began and when it ended.

It was the same attitude — the concept of manifest destiny — that directed the westward expansion in the 19th century. America is entitled to seize what it wants.

American imperialism — as well as hubris — is what the terrorists really would like to see destroyed.

The First Attack on the Twin Towers ...

Do you remember where you were 20 years ago today?

I had just started my second semester of teaching at the University of Oklahoma. A little more than two years later, we would all be absorbed by the bombing of the federal building in nearby Oklahoma City, but, on this day in 1993, our attention was on the World Trade Center in New York where someone had set off a bomb in the underground parking area of the North Tower.

I remember lingering in the campus newsroom, watching TV reports and trying to figure out what it all meant. On our TV screen, we saw a lot of smoke and a lot of soot–stained faces on people who were being brought out of the building. Six people were killed that day (seven if you count the unborn child one of the victims was carrying); more than 1,000 were injured.

But as far as we (and, no doubt, most Americans) were concerned, the reason for the bombing was incomprehensible.

As spectacular as those numbers appeared at the time, the bombing did not go off as intended. The plan was for the bomb to knock the North Tower into the South Tower and bring both down, killing thousands in the process. Neither tower fell that day. That would have to wait about 8½ years.

Ramzi Yousef was the mastermind behind the plan. Although it failed to accomplish the objective, it was revised and became the 9–11 plan, which did bring both towers down and did result in the deaths of thousands.

I guess that was the first salvo in the War on Terrorism, although few, if any, realized it that day. Initial (and erroneous) news reports focused on the likelihood that a main transformer may have blown.

My recollection is that neither I nor anyone around me (the other professors, the students, etc.) understood what had happened that day.

Of course, none of us had any idea what would happen in 2001, when the terrorists returned with a vengeance. We were blissfully ignorant at that time.

That would change.

Satisfaction

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"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

Mark Twain

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The announcement yesterday of Osama bin Laden's death was a unique moment in contemporary history — unifying, in fact, and I felt compelled to share it with people so I stayed up later than I normally would on a Sunday night and listened to a few conversations on Facebook — even contributed to a couple.

When I went to bed, I was experiencing mixed, even conflicting, emotions over an event that should assure every living American that we have now heard what Paul Harvey might have called "the rest of the story."

There should be satisfaction in that.

Practically a decade ago, America was plunged deep into an abyss of shock and grief, and bin Laden was responsible for that. He did not hijack the airplanes nor did he crash them into buildings — but, in the language of the space age, he activated the launch sequence.

I know people who have been living for this moment for the last 10 years — and, judging from some of the comments I saw last night, many of them realize, albeit belatedly, that bin Laden's death is not the end of it, as they long had hoped it would be.

And that is a bitter revelation for those who believe in peace.

Violence only begets more violence, I read several times, and I have been thinking that that must surely be true of people like bin Laden, who live to inflict pain and damage on others. His followers are sure to be looking for some way to retaliate, and, if I or anyone I knew happened to be living abroad, I would be very concerned.

What's more, the world's experience with bin Laden and al Qaeda tells everyone how patient and calculating these terrorists can be. Those who possess bin Laden's discipline and dedication won't mind waiting years to avenge this — perhaps on a sunny autumn day in 2021.

In my lifetime, I have seen men of peace who died violent deaths — and, in the process, sparked even greater violence. Bin Laden definitely was not a man of peace.

An eye for an eye isn't merely a biblical passage, and the ones who openly speak it are not the only ones who believe it.

The comments I saw on Facebook last night came from people who occupy every inch on the political spectrum, from extreme left to extreme right and everything in between.

The ones on the left were eager to give Barack Obama all the credit and seize the opportunity to kick George W. Bush for failing to rid the world of bin Laden during his eight years in office.

The ones on the right were defensive about Bush and more prone to give credit to the guys on the ground who actually did the dirty work.

Both were right, I suppose, and, even though neither side appears to be terribly eager to give so much as a centimeter to the other, there is some common ground to be found.

The fact is that it is satisfying to know that the man who was responsible for the deaths of so many, for the pain and suffering experienced by so many who survived 9–11 and will never forget the horror they witnessed, is now dead.

But it would be naive to think that this is the end of it.

I'm not sure if I agree with Obama that this is justice — although, as I wrote last night, this may be as close to justice as we were ever likely to get.

But it wasn't the kind of justice I would have preferred to see — the kind where the guilty must answer for his crimes before a judge and jury.

Perhaps, since bin Laden eagerly acknowledged his involvement in the 9–11 attacks, that wasn't necessary.

I don't know. I am left with my original question.

Was it justice or vengeance?

The Campaign That Might Have Been

Last year, many Republicans made no secret of their dissatisfaction with their party's nominee. Never mind the fact that John McCain was the winner of 31 Republican primaries, including several head–to–head contests with his leading rivals (Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney).

Right–wing Republicans may have yearned for a candidate whose views more closely mirrored their own, but there was one problem — nobody who met their standards sought the nomination. Some may argue that there were those — Romney, Huckabee, Ron Paul — who came close but fell short in one way or another.

They might have been better representatives of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in many ways, but their main problem was that conservatives never united behind them.

That's how it works in American politics. The concept of "drafting" a reluctant candidate for the presidency is an antiquated notion. To be nominated by a major party, one must actively campaign for the nomination. It is not an endeavor for wallflowers.

That doesn't prevent pundits from fantasizing about what might have been — even if what might have been was never very likely to begin with.

Such is the case with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who rhapsodizes about what might have been if Dick Cheney had been the nominee instead of McCain.

Cheney is one of two vice presidents in my lifetime who never ran for president — the other was Spiro Agnew.

Agnew may have fantasized about seeking the nomination — before his crimes caught up with him — but he and Cheney are the only veeps who never ran for the top job. And it's extremely unlikely that Cheney will do so. He will turn 70 in 2011.

Most of the time, someone who serves as vice president seeks the presidency after completing his tenure — but not always. Some, like Al Gore and George H.W. Bush, run as sitting vice presidents. Others, like Walter Mondale, run later.

And some — like Lyndon Johnson — ran for president before they became vice president.

Some point out, for example, that Gerald Ford's vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, did not seek the presidency after Ford left the White House in 1977, which is true, but Rockefeller did seek the GOP nomination (unsuccessfully) in the 1960s. And, even if he does not seek the presidency after his time as vice president ends, Joe Biden will not join Cheney and Agnew because he made two abbreviated attempts to win the nomination (in 1988 and 2008) before he was chosen to be Barack Obama's running mate.

Even Dan Quayle, who is arguably the gold standard for poorly regarded vice presidents, sought the nomination — briefly — in 2000.

In the last years of his vice presidency, Cheney's disapproval numbers rivaled Quayle's. By the time that he left office, Cheney's performance got a thumbs–down by a 2–to–1 ratio in a Washington Post poll.

He was not a popular guy, even when he accidentally shot a lawyer on a hunting trip three years ago. And, given his health problems over the years (most notably, four heart attacks), one can legitimately wonder if he could have stood up to the rigors of a presidential campaign.

But Douthat seems to have few doubts about what would have been his suitability to seek the presidency.

"Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration's interrogation policies," writes Douthat, "it's been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008."

Douthat doesn't suggest that Cheney might have beaten Obama, which is wise. Once the economic meltdown occurred last fall, I felt the election was a done deal. Republicans might even have fared worse with an actual member of the Bush administration at the top of the ticket than they did with McCain, who had the virtue (in the public's eyes) of having opposed some of Bush's policies.

Douthat argues that Cheney would have been "as disciplined and ideologically consistent as McCain was feckless," and he presumes that he would have been as "cuttingly effective" in the presidential debates as he was in his vice presidential debates in 2000 and 2004.

But the real benefit, Douthat seems to think, would have been that "when he went down to a landslide loss, the conservative movement might — might! — have been jolted into the kind of rethinking that's necessary if it hopes to regain power."

Beyond that, Douthat says a Cheney candidacy could have had a cleansing effect on the country that the McCain candidacy did not have.

"The former vice president's post–election attacks on Obama are bad form," he acknowledges. "But they're part of an argument about the means and ends of our interrogation policy that should have happened during the general election and didn't — because McCain wasn't a supporter of the Bush–era approach, and Obama didn't see a percentage in harping on the topic."

I don't know if that is true. A lot of things should have been discussed in recent presidential campaigns but never got discussed in spite of the presence in the campaign of the people who made the important policy choices. The war in Iraq, for example, should have been talked about at length during the 2004 campaign — but the public was easily distracted by stories from Vietnam and whether gay people should be allowed to marry. In previous campaigns, serious issues took a back seat while there were heated debates about things like flag burning.

Nevertheless, Douthat makes a valid point when he says, "where the Bush administration's interrogation programs are concerned, we've heard too much to just 'look forward,' as the president would have us do. We need to hear more: What was done and who approved it, and what intelligence we really gleaned from it. Not so that we can prosecute ... but so that we can learn and pass judgment and struggle toward consensus."

Could that have been achieved through a Cheney candidacy? I don't know. I have my doubts. But Douthat doesn't appear to be skeptical.

"Here Dick Cheney, prodded by the ironies of history into demanding greater disclosure about programs he once sought to keep completely secret, has an important role to play," Douthat writes. "He wants to defend his record; let him defend it. And let the country judge.

"But better if this debate had happened during the campaign season. And better, perhaps, if Cheney himself had been there to have it out."

That may be so. But I still doubt that the desire for disclosure would have been satisfied if the sitting vice president, with his penchant for secrecy, had been the Republican standard bearer.

Perhaps he feels freer now, as the former vice president, to speak openly about his role. And perhaps that would be a good thing for the country.

But I am dubious — at best — that having Cheney at the top of the ticket instead of McCain would have helped the Republicans see more clearly what they must do to get back in the voters' good graces.

The 'War on Terrorism' Tightrope

Barack Obama is obsessed with bipartisanship.

That isn't an entirely bad thing. The George W. Bush years might not have been so bad if he and the Republicans in Congress had reached out more to their Democratic brethren, particularly the moderates. And, no doubt, it would make it easier to do the things that need to be done now if more Republicans were on board.

But, whichever party is in control of things — Democrats now, Republicans in the first half of this decade — eventually faces issues about which its members have strong feelings — and about which the opposition party has equally strong feelings. On both sides, it cuts to the core of what it means to be a Democrat or to be a Republican.

In those situations, the party that is in the majority has to abandon the desire for bipartisan support and keep its own members in line. The objective is to pass the legislation. If you happen to get a couple of votes from the other side, that's icing on the cake.

And that may be the kind of situation Democrats face now when the subject is investigating how the Bush administration waged the war on terrorism.

Given that a Democratic president may be in the position of authorizing an investigation into the administration of his Republican predecessor, Obama is understandably reluctant to pursue this. My gut tells me he waffles on some of these issues to stay on the good side of those who didn't vote for him last year.

But that's the wrong approach to take, considering that public opinion seems to favor some kind of review of the decisions that were made. It seems that this probe is going to happen, whether Obama supports it or not, and he risks alienating some who helped him win the presidency if he doesn't accommodate them.

Apparently, this "yes we can" movement doesn't rely on any one man, but it does depend on commitment to certain principles.

So what Obama needs to do is take the lead in structuring the investigation. And Jon Meacham provides some common–sense guidelines in Newsweek for that.

• No televised hearings, like we had during Watergate and again during Iran–Contra. Inevitably, somebody (maybe several somebodies) will give in to the temptation to grandstand.


• Don't pursue criminal charges "against officials at the highest levels — including the former president and the former vice president." I'm not so sure about that one, although I understand how it would look on the surface.
  
  I keep thinking about Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon about a month after Nixon resigned, and I think that Ford paid a high price for that pardon throughout his presidency. In hindsight, I understand his reasoning, but I don't think he did a good job of articulating it for the American people. If he had, his presidency might have been more successful.
  
  But Ford wasn't a gifted speaker; thus, he might have been better advised, at that time, to let the justice system run its course, no matter where it took us. Obama is a better speaker than Ford so he may be able to talk his way out of a lot of things, but if public opinion supports the prosecution of some former higher–ups, Obama may be powerless to resist the tide.


• Meacham argues that "[t]he idea that our only options are to move on completely or to prosecute is a classic false choice." He says an alternative is a 9/11 kind of commission that has a certain number of Bush sympathizers. That may be the closest that Obama can come to bipartisanship on this one.
  
  "We heard many similar arguments against the 9/11 Commission that we are now hearing about what we might call a 9/12 panel," Meacham writes, "but the 9/11 report was riveting and revealing, and we are better off for it. Why preemptively foreclose the possibility that a follow–up project would lead us even further forward?"

OK, I get that Obama would prefer not to do this right now. But he can't sidestep any criticism. And flip–flopping will only bring more criticism from both sides.

He also can't avoid an inevitable drop in his approval ratings. He has some (pardon the phrase) political capital to spare right now. He should be true to his principles yet avoid appearing meddlesome.

In other words, pick a side and stick with it. And then, whatever happens, don't interfere.

John Kass, a columnist for the libertarian/conservative–leaning Chicago Tribune, writes today that, contrary to the image of "flexible leader" that Obama has sought to project, "last week, he bowed to his base in the hard political left by reversing himself, opening the door for the prosecution of Bush Justice Department officials who helped develop harsh interrogation policies for suspected terrorists."

Kass says Obama "must stop campaigning someday and start thinking like a chief executive."

I agree — but part of being a good leader is being responsive to the desires of those being led.

And I believe the Ford experience shows there is a price to be paid for preventing the system from doing its job.