| What Clinton's Op-Ed Really Means |
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April 6, 2004 |
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This is a Democrat Party that is flailing away. They are basically, they have fallen down a well. They've fallen down a mine, a sinkhole or whatever, and they're hanging on by their fingertips -- and they're bringing out all the old pages and all the old guys and all the old people in the playbook to try to hold on and grab themselves back up and put themselves on the surface, and they just don't have anywhere to go. I don't care how stringent their criticism of Bush gets and I don't care how strident it gets. That's not a reason to elect anybody to high office -- especially during periods of time like this. Now, amidst all this -- this is another way I'm attempting to help you people figure some of these things out. In the midst of all of this, out of the blue today in the New York Times, is an op-ed by the 42nd president of the United States, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton. |
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Did I say New York Times? It's the Washington Post. I'm sorry. [program observer interruption] Well, no, it's actually [program observer interruption]. The Washington Post has been doing some good work lately. [program observer interruption] No, no, Mr. Snerdley. Mr. Snerdley, do not have your typical knee-jerk reaction in there, because when these people in the mainstream press, the partisan media, when they make moves in the right direction, they must be acknowledged. The Post has a terrific editorial today on Iraq. They have been right on Iraq since the get-go. They have been one of Bush's primary supporters. You had Dana Millbank and some of their front page news stories you can throw in the trash with the fish, but you get to the editorial page. Their editorial page still does not lead the front page as the New York Times does. It's not totally good, but when they're making moves in the right direction you got to acknowledge it. So it does make a difference.
 But Clinton's op-ed is in the Washington Post today. In the midst of all of this, in the midst of Kerry trying to get a grasp on things in the midst of the Democrats trying to get some traction, all of a sudden here comes their worst enemy popping up -- and it's not just that he's popping up. He writes about his administration and his party's foreign policy failure in Rwanda. Now, the timing of this is instructive; it's curious. Remember, it was just last week, late last week that news hit that the administration, the Clinton administration, did know what was going on in Rwanda at the time. Their stated policy was that this was all going on and they didn't know about it, but some internal documents got released, and it was found out that the Clinton administration was quite aware what was going on. So Mr. Let-Me-Write-My-Legacy-Every-Day-If-I-Have-to-in-Order-to-Get-a-Good-One, decides he needed to react to this, and the Post offered him a page. But if you read this piece, and I'm not going to bother you with reading it all, if you read this piece you find out that this is not helpful to the Kerry campaign.
[Reading from Clinton op-ed:] "This month marks ten years since the advent of the Rwandan genocide, a cruel, violent, well-organized rampage that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children, and the total destruction of Rwandan society over the past decades scholars and advocates have rightly reflected on the reasons that the international community and nations in Africa must share the responsibility for this tragedy. And as I said during my trip to Rwanda 1998, we didn't act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide." He goes on. This whole piece is: We didn't act quickly enough. I'm sorry. We didn't take this seriously enough.
The message here, ladies and gentlemen, to me, Clinton's whole message here undercuts the criticism of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and their criticism of Bush's tough stance on terrorism in Iraq. Because if Clinton is saying, "We didn't react soon enough to this. We apologize. I'm sorry. This was going on and we didn't do enough about it," what possible conclusion can you draw other than we cannot ignore what's going on in Iraq? There is genocide and we cannot ignore the death. We cannot ignore what's happening with these terrorists elsewhere. If we're supposed to make amends for our mistake in Rwanda, how do we do it? We can't go back and refight Rwanda so what we have to do is make sure we don't make the same mistake and cut and run and get out of Iraq. This is one of the ways it is going to be interpreted. This is not by accident. This is not. |
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There's some. I'm not going to OK yet on the real modus operandi or the purpose of this op-ed, except the one obvious thing, and that's to get Clinton off the hook on the last bit of news that came out last week that they knew about it, when in fact they were saying that they didn't. But this piece has the potential to render John Kerry as toast. This has the potential to take him totally out of the campaign because John Kerry doesn't speak this way. John Kerry is not on record as saying, "We should have seen what was going on and we ought to move in to stop it." John Kerry is all about doing it the other way, "Let's go to the UN and make sure our allies are doing this," and Clinton in this piece is, "We saw a genocide taking place, and we didn't act soon enough and we apologize." The simplest way to say this is, this is adversely proportional to the current articulated foreign policy of the Democratic Party.
This is our old pal Bill Clinton undercutting his own party in the midst of what his own party thinks is a moment of great weakness of George W. Bush. They are in essence having their knees cut out from under them. Or if you take my analogy, Kerry and all these guys are holding on the top of the minority well by the fingertips; Clinton has just come along and stomped on their hands with this piece on Rwanda. It's aaaall about Bill. It's all about his future. It's all about his legacy -- and it's, of course, all about 2008 so he and Hillary can get back in. Now, my friends, this probably will not be portrayed again in the partisan media as I am portraying it for you here. But internally -- and you'll never hear about this. But in the Kerry camp right now where John Sasso has run in. John Sasso is the new campaign guy, Dukakis' guy. They went out and got the loser that ran the Loser's campaign and moved him to Kerry's campaign.
I will guarantee you, behind closed doors at one of the Kerry Swiss ski chalets or wherever they are today, there's a bunch of muttering and profanity and all this. "What the hell does he think he's doing? He can write this any time. Why does he...?" They are all atizzy about this. We'll never hear about it, but the Democrats are going to start saying, "He could have waited for this. If this hits now, what does his book got in store for us when they release his book right before our convention?" (Laughter.) I just love this. As I say, I'm not going to bother reading the whole thing to you, but it's one of the biggest mea culpas and "I'm sorry" and "we didn't see this soon enough," and "let's not make this mistake again" pieces that you have ever seen. And you put this in juxtaposition right next to the current foreign policy challenges we've got, and it's pretty much a stamp of approval for what Bush is doing and a plea for support. "Let's not make this mistake again. Let's be tough."
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Read the Article... |
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Headline: Al Qaeda absent from final Clinton report
Source: Washington Times
Dateline: April 06, 2004
Byline: James G. Lakely
The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress — 45,000 words long — makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times.
The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an "urgent" threat, while President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, "ignored" it.
The Clinton document, titled "A National Security Strategy for a Global Age," is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly available, though no U.S. media outlets have examined it in the context of Mr. Clarke's testimony and new book.
Miss Rice, who will testify publicly Thursday before the commission investigating the Bush and Clinton administrations' actions before the September 11 attacks, was criticized last week for planning a speech for September 11, 2001, that called a national missile-defense system a leading security priority.
President Bush yesterday denied the accusation that his administration had made dealing with al Qaeda a low priority.
"Let me just be very clear about this: Had we had the information that was necessary to stop an attack, I'd have stopped the attack," Mr. Bush said, adding that after September 11, "the stakes had changed."
"This country immediately went on war footing, and we went to war against al Qaeda. It took me very little time to make up my mind," he said. "Once I determined al Qaeda [did] it, [I said], 'We're going to go get them.' And we have, and we're going to keep after them until they're brought to justice and America is secure."
Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will meet with the commission in the coming weeks behind closed doors, but a date has not been set. Meanwhile, the president said he looks forward to hearing Miss Rice defend the administration in a public forum.
"She'll be great," Mr. Bush said. "She's a very smart, capable person who knows exactly what took place and will lay out the facts."
The Clinton administration's final national-security report stated that its reaction to terrorist strikes was to "neither forget the crime, nor ever give up on bringing the perpetrators to justice."
The document boasted of "a dozen terrorist fugitives" who had been captured abroad and handed over to the United States "to answer for their crimes."
Those perpetrators included the men responsible for the first attack on the World Trade Center, which the intelligence community largely thought by late 2000 to be the work of operatives with links to al Qaeda. Listed among those brought to justice was a man who killed two persons outside CIA headquarters in 1993, and "an attack on a Pan Am flight more than 18 years ago."
Several high-ranking Bush administration officials, and the president himself, have faulted the Clinton administration for treating global terrorism as a law enforcement issue and not recognizing that bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1998.
Mr. Bush often notes that about two-thirds of al Qaeda's thousands of members — including many key leaders — have been either captured or killed since the attacks, and that 44 of the 55 top Iraqi officials under Saddam Hussein in a deck of cards have been "taken care of."
The liberal Center for American Progress yesterday echoed Mr. Clarke's criticism of the Bush administration by publishing a timeline of statements that it says proves the current White House national security team did not make fighting al Qaeda a priority before the attacks.
"If they were developing some big strategy of fighting terrorism, it's not reflected in their words," said John Halpin, director of research for the center.
"We wanted to go back and document all the public statements, given some of the discrepancies of what happened before 9/11 and some of the recent news from Richard Clarke," Mr. Halpin said.
In Mr. Clarke's best-selling book "Against All Enemies," he writes that during a transitional briefing in January 2001, Miss Rice's "facial expression gave me the impression that she'd never heard the term [al Qaeda] before."
But the Clinton administration's final national security document, written while Mr. Clarke was a high-level national security adviser, never mentions al Qaeda.
"Clarke was on the job as terrorism czar at that point," said a senior Bush administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "He played a significant role. His concerns should have been well-known."
High-ranking Bush administration officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, have testified that Mr. Bush wanted to stop "swatting at flies" and take a more aggressive approach to terror.
The Bush administration official noted that the planning of the September 11 attacks happened while Mr. Clinton was in power, and said the commission's probe has turned into a search for blame.
"It's a shame we are not focused more on moving forward, instead of about who was concerned more," he said.
The official said he found the lack of bin Laden and al Qaeda references in the final Clinton terror assessment interesting, but downplayed such "word-counting games."
"We don't measure progress or response [to terrorism] by how many speeches, words, utterances or meetings were held on a particular issue, but by action taken," he said.
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