Republican senators, cowed by the polls, made it clear before the proceedings started that they would not call witnesses, introduce new evidence into the record, or in any way ask any questions that might embarrass the president. The trial was over before it had begun, and Clinton was acquitted by a vote of 56 to 44. Although four Republicans voted for acquittal, not a single Democrat voted for conviction.
Clinton and the Democrats crowed about the November elections in which the Republicans lost seats in the House (but still maintained a majority) as evidence that impeachment was misguided. Clinton tried to claim vindication by the vote. In fact, however, a cynical disgust had set in. Just as the Republicans had overestimated the strength of their 1994 victory, Clinton misread both the verdict of impeachment and the results of the two national elections in which he had failed to receive 50 percent of the vote in either. By 1999, surveys increasingly showed that people would not go into business with the president, or even allow him to babysit for their kids. The public tolerated him, but certainly did not trust him. Late-night comedians made Clinton a regular part of their routines, and Saturday Night Live mercilessly ridiculed him. By the time impeachment was over, Hubbell and the McDougals had been jailed; Vince Foster was dead; Elders and Espy had resigned in disgrace; and Dick Morris, Clinton’s adviser, had quit in the midst of his own scandal with a prostitute. Later, on the basis of his fraudulent statement to Judge Wright, Clinton was disbarred in Arkansas.
Once cleared of the charges, Clinton embarked on a quest for legacy building, attempting to erase the state of the Lewinsky saga from his presidency. Much of his effort involved intervention abroad, although some of those initiatives had started long before any articles of impeachment were drawn up. Unfortunately, some of them were shaped and directed while Clinton’s mind was on his impeachment battle, among other things.
Missions Undefined
Having avoided the military draft during the Vietnam era, President Clinton committed more troops to combat situations than any peacetime president in American history. Supporting a humanitarian food-delivery mission in Somalia in 1992, George Bush had dispatched 25,000 troops with the understanding that the United Nations would take over the job of food distribution. But in June 1993, after Pakistani peacekeepers were killed by local warlords, Clinton expanded the mission to hunt down the leading troublemaker, General Mohammed Adid.
Using seize-and-arrest missions, carried out by the Rangers and Delta Force, mostly in Mogadishu, American troops sought Adid without success, although they captured many of his lieutenants. The raids usually went off without a hitch, but one attempt to grab Adid turned into a disaster. When the plan went awry, American helicopters were shot down and 18 Rangers, pilots, and special forces troops were killed. One Ranger’s dead body was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.69 Clinton pulled the American forces out, leading anti-American terrorists like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to coin a “Mogadishu strategy”: killing enough American soldiers that a president would lose popular support for the mission.
Unlike Somalia, which the world soon forgot or ignored, a more troublesome sore spot was the Balkans, in which Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Yugoslavia had been kept together in the communist era by Marshall Tito’s delicate use of brute force and political balance. Once communism fell, each ethnic group again sought its own national status. Notions that these groups lived peacefully side by side under communism seriously underestimated the skill and oppressive force that Tito had used to keep the fractured nation together.
When Croatia withdrew from Yugoslavia, the major substate, Serbia, under President Slobodan Milosevic, sent troops to aid the local Serb sympathizers in putting down the Croatian rebellion. Croatia managed to stave off the Serbs, but Bosnia, which had declared independence in 1992, had mixed ethnic groups and multiple nationalities, presenting a more difficult task in resisting the Serbs. A new Balkan war started to erupt as the Serbs engaged in “ethnic cleansing,” a process of outright killing of non-Serbs or, at the very least, driving them out of areas controlled by Milosevic’s forces. Serb policies starkly resembled Hitler’s campaign to eradicate the Jews, and Milosevic was personally so unappealing that he was easily demonized in the press. Although Clinton promised support to NATO, most Americans viewed the Balkans as a European problem. Moreover, with Russia’s continued support of its old ally, Serbia, the old NATO-versus-Warsaw Pact antagonisms threatened to reignite.
NATO air power supported Croatian and Bosnian forces in driving back the Serbs. In 1995 the warring parties agreed to a meeting in Dayton, Ohio, where they signed the Dayton Accords, creating a unified but partitioned Bosnia with Muslims and Croats in one area and Bosnian Serbs in another. This agreement required the presence of 60,000 NATO peacekeepers, including 20,000 U.S. troops, which testified to the weakness of the settlement. United Nations investigators found mass graves containing 3,000 Muslims, leading to the indictments of several Serb leaders as war criminals.
Milosevic refused to go away, instead focusing on a new target, the region of Kosovo, controlled by a Serbian minority and populated by numerous Muslim Albanians. The Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim-armed terrorist organization, began a series of attacks on Serb targets in 1998, whereupon Milosevic dispatched more Serb troops. Western press reports of widespread atrocities—most of which were later shown to be unverifiable—once again prompted Clinton to commit American forces through NATO. Desperate to draw attention away from his White House scandals, yet aware that he did not dare repeat the Vietnam ground scenario in the Balkans, Clinton ordered the Pentagon to carefully conduct the campaign from 15,000 feet to avoid U.S. casualties. According to the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, Clinton made a “major blunder” in ruling out the use of ground troops from the beginning.70 Despite steady bombardment, the Serbs suffered only minor military damage: the worst destruction involved a mistaken American attack on the Chinese embassy. The Serbs had fooled NATO, skillfully employing clever decoys in large numbers. Like the Gulf War, the Kosovo campaign featured a coalition of NATO aircraft, but unlike Desert Storm, it lacked any clear mission except to make Kosovo safe for the Kosovars. Once Milosevic had forced all the Kosovars out—which had been his objective—he agreed to negotiations. Less than a decade later, NATO commanders would admit they could not “keep peace” there any longer.
Another ongoing source of foreign policy trouble was the Middle East, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since the administration of Jimmy Carter, American policy makers have expended countless hours and vast treasure on obtaining a peace in the region, specifically a lasting agreement between Israel and her Muslim neighbors.
Handshake agreements with photo opportunities, such as the Wye Plantation “nonagreement” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, played perfectly to Clinton’s own inclinations for quick fixes abroad. Two interrelated challenges revealed the deadly weakness of this view of international affairs. The first was the revival of Saddam Hussein. During the Gulf War, George Bush and his advisers had chosen not to overthrow Hussein because it would, in all likelihood, have resulted in a bloody civil war among Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as the minority Kurds, and it risked escalation to a broader war involving Iran or Turkey. An inevitable American/NATO/allied occupation of Baghdad would have placed U.S. peacekeepers in constant danger from all parties. Thus, allied war aims in 1991 did not include removing Hussein; he was only to be rendered incapable of offensive military action. Many analysts in Europe and the Middle East thought internal opposition would force Hussein out anyway without additional pressure. That did not happen, and Hussein carried a grudge from his battlefield humiliation.
Where Clinton underestimated Hussein was in the Iraqi’s ability and willingness to use terrorist weapons against western powers. In 1981 the Israeli Air Force had bombed the Iraqi Osirak nuclear power facility, claiming that Hussein intended it for the production of nuclear weapons. Iraq then took its nuclear program underground, emplo
ying as many as seven thousand in an attempt to manufacture a nuclear bomb or missile.71 Hussein cleverly hid his main biological and chemical weapons facilities in defiance of United Nations resolutions. Throughout the Clinton administration, in speech after speech by Clinton, Al Gore, and other top Democrats, the point was reaffirmed that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, and was likely getting nukes.
Another figure, whom the Clinton administration totally ignored, actually posed a more immediate threat. Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi-born fundamentalist Muslim who had been exiled from his homeland and taken up residence in Afghanistan, directly attacked United States soil. On February 26, 1993, bin Laden’s agents (using Iraqi passports) had set off a massive car bomb under the structure of the World Trade Center (WTC), killing seven people and wounding some seven hundred. They had intended to bring the WTC down but failed. Four Muslims were captured and tried, including Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. In 1994 a New York City jury found all four guilty of murder. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the plan, was captured two years later and also convicted.
From the safety of Sudan, then Afghanistan, bin Laden planned his next strike against the United States. A plan to hijack several airliners over the Pacific was foiled. Then, in August 1998, powerful bombs ripped apart the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania, leaving 184 dead (including 12 Americans) and thousands wounded.72 Clinton ordered retaliatory strikes, including the bombing of alleged terrorist camps in Sudan and bin Laden’s headquarters in Afghanistan, but only an aspirin factory was hit. Clinton succeeded in proving to bin Laden that he wanted a bloodless victory from afar.
The entire Clinton approach to bin Laden (and all terrorists) was to treat terrorism as a law enforcement problem and not a national security/military issue. This policy had far-reaching (and negative) effects because when a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef is indicted, all evidence is sealed and cannot be used by the FBI or CIA to thwart other attacks. It was not a program designed to deal with the evil bin Laden. Bin Laden’s forces staged other attacks: on the Khobar Towers in Dharan, Saudi Arabia; on the USS Cole; and a foiled assault on the USS The Sullivans—all without any serious retaliation by the United States under Clinton.
Only after 9/11 did evidence surface that Clinton had turned down not one but three offers from foreign governments to seize bin Laden, one by Sudan in 1996 and one by a Pakistani official working with an “unnamed Gulf State” in July 2000, and a third undated offer from the Saudi secret police, who had traced the luggage of bin Laden’s mother when she visited him.73 Having hurled expensive Tomahawks at unoccupied tents in a public show of force, Clinton thereafter, according to his advisers, demonstrated a consistent lack of interest in, or commitment to, the fight against terrorism. He consistently downgraded funding requests for the Central Intelligence Agency’s human intelligence capabilities and rejected any attempts to watch terror suspects within U.S. borders, unless they were somehow tied to white militia groups.74
Yet as Clinton escaped conviction and coasted to the end of his second term, the threat of Osama bin Laden seemed remote, if not insignificant. Saddam Hussein posed what was thought to be a regional threat, but lacked (it was thought) the ability to launch direct attacks on the United States. Damaged but still determined, Clinton continued to rely on the economy to advance his proposals, though they became increasingly smaller in focus. Evidence had already begun to surface, however, that the economy was not in the great shape Clinton—and the country—thought. Worse, the terrorist threat he had all but ignored resurfaced in a tragic and horrific way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
America, World Leader, 2000 and Beyond
A Generation Challenged
During the 1990s, Americans were repeatedly reminded of “the greatest generation”—those who had come out of the Great Depression and swept away the Axis powers in World War II.1 Implied in the term was the assumption that the United States had reached its apex of honor, courage, and determination in 1945, and had been on a downward slope ever since. The Clinton presidency seemed to underscore this assumption. The first boomer president, Clinton seemed to personify everything the GIs had not: a self-absorbed man who had avoided national military service and never delayed gratification.
Many Americans were beginning to doubt their own purpose, and America’s position, in the world. Yet just when some thought that the horrors endured by the GIs could not be topped, nor their courage matched, and just as the nation’s moral compass fluttered wildly, everything changed in a nanosecond. A bitterly contested election put an unlikely figure in the White House, but a bloodthirsty attack drew Americans together, at least temporarily, with direction and patriotism. An old enemy surfaced to remind the United States of its primacy in the world and of the relative irrelevance of international action.
Time Line
2000:
Election of George W. Bush disputed by Al Gore; case goes to United States Supreme Court in December; Court rules that Gore’s challenge is unconstitutional; Bush elected president by electoral college; Republicans win Senate and House for first time since the 1950s
2001:
Muslim terrorists attack World Trade Center and Pentagon (9/11); Bush declares war on terror; United States invades Afghanistan and overthrows Taliban government friendly to Al Qaeda terrorists; Al Qaeda evicted from Afghanistan, assets frozen
2002:
Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan destroyed; “Axis of Evil” speech; D.C. Snipers; GOP wins historic election
2003:
Operation Iraqi Freedom; Baghdad captured
2004:
Iraqi interim government assumes control of Iraq
Clintonism Collapses
After the 1996 election—and before the impeachment process had gained momentum—Bill Clinton stood atop the political world. His approval ratings held in the low 60 percent range; he successfully claimed credit for reforming welfare and for getting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed; and he had mastered the new political art of triangulation. Pockets of hard-core liberalism remained—on the West Coast and in New England especially—but Clinton thrived largely by taking credit for conservative legislation, such as welfare reform, passed by the Republicans. Most of all, he pointed to the apparently healthy economy.
All of these benefits fell on the obvious Democratic nominee, incumbent Vice President Albert Gore Jr., who had easily won the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles.
Seldom in American history had sitting vice presidents lost during times of peace and prosperity (Richard Nixon, in 1960, is one of the few who did). The advantages of incumbency, combined with unease about changing horses, creates a powerful disadvantage for the challenger. Al Gore, however, could not boast too much about the economy without associating himself with his boss. Consequently, during his acceptance speech (where he introduced his mantra “I am my own man”) and throughout his campaign, he shied away from the Clinton record, even to the extent that he did not tout the booming economy. A darker fact may also have influenced Gore’s unwillingness to run on prosperity: storm warnings were appearing on the horizon by mid-2000, but subsequent review of Commerce Department statistics suggests the government had put the best possible spin on the nation’s economic health, possibly even misstating the actual growth numbers.2 Either way, Gore could see that he had no choice but to distance himself from the president.
As for Republicans, the race for the White House actually started with Bob Dole’s defeat in November 1996. Many GOP analysts concluded that the party needed a “charisma injection,” and that it could not afford to run any more “tired old men” merely out of obligation. Some Republicans yearned for a “GOP Clinton”—someone who could soften the ideological edges to appeal to the soccer moms and the independents who had deserted Dole in 1996.3 However, any candidate had to represent strong conservative positions against gun control, abortion, and taxes.
In late 1999, just such a new star appeared on the
GOP horizon when popular Texas Governor George W. Bush, the son of the former president, threw his hat in the ring. Bush, or Dubya, as he was called to differentiate him from his father, had gone from Midland, Texas, to Andover and Yale, where he admittedly achieved mediocrity. A typical frat boy, Bush graduated and served as a lieutenant in the air national guard, where he flew F-104 fighter planes. He received an MBA from Harvard (the first president ever to do so), where he began to take his education more seriously.4 Returning to Midland, he attempted to make a career in the oil business, but it went badly. Bush and other investors had started a small company just as oil prices plunged worldwide. When his father ran for president in 1988, Dubya worked on his campaign as a speechwriter and made enough contacts to put together a partnership to purchase the Texas Rangers professional baseball team in 1989. Running the team as managing general partner, Bush later joked that his only noteworthy accomplishment had been trading home run star Sammy Sosa to the Chicago Cubs. In fact, he did an excellent job restoring the team to competitiveness on the field and solvency on the books.
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