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Clinton's Sad Foreign Policy Legacy
by Alan Bock
Madeleine Albright, as Agence
France-Presse recently reported, closed out her final mission abroad
in style. The comfortable converted Boeing 757 used by the Secretary of
State for trips abroad, on which la Albright has logged almost a million
miles in four years, was stocked with fine champagne and French cheeses
for the final Albright trip from Europe – another one of those
foreign-minister shindigs – to the United States.
Maddie showed off a gift from
French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, a rare 1839 edition of Alexis de
Tocqueville's Democracy in America. If only one might hope that she
would read it with even a modicum of comprehension. But that's unlikely.
De Tocqueville celebrated (although hardly with blinkered eyes) a hardy
frontier democracy that featured self-reliance and placed high value on
the notion of minding one's own business unless one's neighbor was really
in trouble or asked for help. Madame Albright represents a micromanaging
empire of the type de Tocqueville feared might develop in America, and one
that simply can't help sticking its nose into other peoples' business, not
just at home but all around the world.
Clinton's Legacy
And the maintenance and
development of what is coming to resemble a worldwide nanny state is
likely to be Bill Clinton's legacy in foreign affairs. He had an
unparalleled opportunity, coming into office after the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the death of communism as an imperial superpower, to develop
policies that would increase American prosperity at home and respect
around the world. Instead, he continued and expanded the policies of his
predecessors. Thus prosperity is in peril and respect almost nonexistent
– although more than a few governments are still willing to have Uncle
Sam's taxpayers and military personnel pay the price and bear the burdens.
When Bill Clinton assumed
office a few people hoped that as a member of the generation that opposed
the undeclared Vietnam war – indeed personally protested against it –
he might be inclined to rein in the modern tendency of the Imperial
Presidency to involve U.S. military forces overseas without bothering to
consult Congress, let alone ask it to declare war. Any such hopes were to
be bitterly disappointed. As president, Mr. Clinton took unjustified
military intervention to new heights or new depths.
Aggression as Policy
Perhaps the most significant
foreign-policy legacy of the Clinton era will be the demolition of even
the pretense that the United States involves itself in wars only to deter
aggression or as a defensive move.
Before Clinton US presidents
were generally careful to cast US military action as defensive in nature.
Sometimes the protestations were shaky, as with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution
that, on closer examination, turned out to be a pretext rather than a
response to a clear-cut attack.
The Caribbean leaders who
ostensibly begged for American intervention in Grenada during the Reagan
years sounded coached. But at least there was the appearance of a plea for
help from a foreign country in peril.
Before Clinton, American
presidents by and large made an effort to appear to be responding to
aggression rather than initiating it. In part this was because most
Americans like to think their country is a defender of freedom and a
responder to aggression rather than an imperialist aggressor, and was
designed to hornswoggle the people. But at least most presidents tried to
keep up appearances.
President Clinton abandoned
almost all pretense to a defensive posture; indeed, some of his foreign
attacks could easily be interpreted as cynical "wag the dog"
gestures designed to deflect attention from domestic or personal
embarrassments.
A Drug War on Aspirin
The missile attacks on a
pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and on targets in Afghanistan in August
1998 were said to be linked to Saudi terrorist Osama Bin laden, who was
suspected of orchestrating bombings of US embassies although it turned out
the pharmaceutical factory was not a chemical-weapons facility and it is
almost certain that Clinton knew this and ordered the attack anyway.
Monica Lewinsky testified before a grand jury that day.
So Bill Clinton ordered the
cruise missiles to fly. Not only did he hit a pharmaceutical factory that
was a major source of medical supplies for the impoverished country of
Sudan, he didn't hit anything resembling an Osama Bin Laden terrorist
encampment in Afghanistan. So the attacks were either informed by
incredibly incompetent intelligence or were incredibly cynical in nature
– or both.
Abandoning Any Pretense
All pretense of defensiveness
was scuttled with the December 1998 missile attacks on Iraq. As it became
obvious that the House was going to go through with impeachment, the
president seized on the fact that Saddam Hussein had kicked UN weapons
inspectors out of Iraq two months earlier to launch "Operation Desert
Fox," several days of airstrikes against Iraq. In November Clinton
had UN support for such strikes, but by December he had none; he did it
anyway.
The key factor is that
although Saddam was undoubtedly intransigent with UN inspectors, there was
no evidence – none – that he had attacked another country or had any
near-term intention of doing so, as was at least the case after Saddam
invaded Kuwait in 1990. The airstrikes amounted to naked aggression
against a country that, while undoubtedly led by a murderous tyrant, had
not invaded or threatened its neighbors.
Bombs Over Kosovo
The 1999 air war against
Kosovo and Serbia followed the same pattern. Serbian leader Slobodan
Milosevic is a villain, but when Clinton pushed NATO to launch an air war
against him he had not invaded or threatened to invade any foreign
country. He was putting down a rebellion in Kosovo rather brutally (though
not as brutally as NATO propaganda insisted), but Kosovo was recognized by
every member of the vaunted "international community" as a
province of Yugoslavia. That made the NATO war against Serbia an
undeclared (of course) war of aggression.
President Clinton's
interpretation of executive warmaking authority was positively Nixonian in
its audacity. He also waged war without congressional approval in Haiti
and Bosnia. He insisted that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the
Kyoto global warming treaty were in effect although the Senate declined to
ratify either.
Roger Pilon of the Cato
Institute has edited a book called The
Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton that details how these and
other activities that are not only beyond the scope of the US Constitution
but beyond the scope of existing statutory authority have made a mockery
of the very concept of the rule of law, a concept that arguably is the
essential underpinning of liberty and of civilization itself.
More Of The Same?
Will the next administration
be more restrained in making war? Reading some of the near-hysterical
assessments of Colin Powell's policies and doctrines from people like the
New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan, one is tempted to hope that he will be the
neo-isolationist some fear. But I'm skeptical. Powell is unlikely to be
quite so eager to indulge in "nation-building" or
"humanitarian" interventions as was the Clinton administration
or as a Gore administration would have been. But he and most of the
Bushies see the United States as an imperial power with essential global
"responsibilities" that must be met lest we flunk the test of
world leadership.
Will Congress, therefore, move
to take back its constitutional power at least to have the final word when
it comes to making war? (I'm not so utopian as even to dream of more.)
Unfortunately that's even more doubtful than the prospect that peace in
the Middle East will break out next week.
Alan Bock is Senior
Essayist at the Orange County Register, a
weekly columnist for WorldNetDaily
and a regular contributor to Antiwar.com.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001 Alan
Bock & Antiwar.com
by the same author:
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