Get On With It: Clinton’s Misguided Military Operations, Foreign Initiatives Argue for Accelerating — Not Deferring — Impeachment Proceedings

(Washington, D.C.): The bombing campaign launched yesterday by President Clinton appears
to
be but the latest in a series of cynical, manipulative and largely ill-conceived actions — actions that
may or may not serve Mr. Clinton’s personal, political needs but that certainly threaten to do
lasting harm to the Nation’s interests. Far from justifying a postponement of the impeachment
proceedings against the President, the prospect that further delay might prompt him to engage in
still more reckless behavior argues for a prompt resolution of this momentous constitutional
exercise.

A Bill of Particulars

Recent examples of Mr. Clinton’s readiness to subordinate the national interest to his own
expedient needs of the moment include the following:

• The abortive ‘war on terrorism’: Last August, on the eve of Monica
  Lewinsky’s grand jury
  testimony, President Clinton decided to launch cruise missile attacks against Osama bin
  Laden’s terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan and a facility in Sudan believed to be associated
  with him and the manufacture of chemical weapons.⁽¹⁾ The
  claim that these actions were not
  taken for the purpose of “wagging the dog” — diverting public and media attention from the
  Lewinsky Affair and marshaling political support for the Commander-in-Chief — was undercut
  by the absence of any appreciable follow-up to this opening salvo in the so-called war on
  terrorism.⁽²⁾

• Deals with Slobodan Milosevic: In the run-up to the United States’ 1996
  presidential
  election — when President Clinton expected to be harshly attacked by his Republican opponent,
  Bob Dole, for deliberately neglecting and otherwise contributing to the Serb-precipitated
  bloodletting in Bosnia — the U.S. government finally intervened. Then, shortly before the 1998
  mid-term elections, the President dispatched his special envoy and UN Representative-designate,
  Richard Holbrooke, to stop Serbian “ethnic cleansing” and other atrocities in
  Kosovo that had been underway for months.

In each case, the same technique was employed: After the Serbian dictator, Slobodan
Milosevic, largely completed his genocidal predations, Holbrooke cuts a deal with him.
The deal largely preserves and consolidates Milosevic’s ill-gotten gains and affirms the
Serbian dictator’s indispensability to what passes for “peace-making” in the Balkans.

In this fashion, President Clinton has bought short-term domestic political benefits
at the expense of preserving Milosevic’s hold on power and assuring his ability to
harm yet more innocents in the future. The odiousness of such Faustian pacts is
underscored by the words of State Department spokesman, James Rubin, who last
week declared that “Milosevic has been at the center of every crisis in the former
Yugoslavia over the last decade. He is not simply part of the problem —
Milosevic is the problem.”

• The embrace of a Palestinian state: In October — just after Congress
  recessed and just
  before the mid-term elections — President Clinton summoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
  Netanyahu and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to the Wye River Plantation to achieve yet-another
  “breakthrough” in the Mideast “peace process.” Consistent with the axiom that “If
  you want it bad, you’ll get it bad,” Mr. Clinton personally managed the negotiations that
  produced an accord signed with great fanfare at the White House after 10 days of haggling.
  While this achievement appears to have had its desired effect for the President (i.e., by
  “wagging the dove” demonstrating his continued influence, prestige and power and
  that he was
  not an unalloyed liability to his party and its candidates), it seriously disserved American
  interests in a secure Israel.⁽³⁾

This is even more obvious in the wake of the President’s appalling visit to the region
this week. In the window of the denouement of the impeachment proceedings in the
House of Representatives, he traveled to Israel and Palestinian-controlled areas in Gaza
and the West Bank. While there, Mr. Clinton did serious harm to the cause of real
peace by: enormously inflating Palestinian expectations for sovereign statehood — a
development sure to lead to instability and probably war⁽⁴⁾;
indulging in wholesale
moral equivalence between the victims of Palestinian terror and its perpetrators; and
further straining the critical U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Just how dangerous such short-sighted policies can be is on display in the wake of
the first day of bombings in Iraq as Palestinians, only too happy to wave American
flags when President Clinton was in town pandering to Palestinian nationalism,
have two days later reverted to burning them in solidarity with their Arab brother,
Saddam Hussein. The problem is that, unlike the President of the United States —
who often simply walks away from his foreign policy initiatives once they have
served their immediate political purpose, Israelis have no choice but to live with
the ominous consequences of his actions.

Of a Piece — the Attack on Iraq?

It is painful to those, like the Center for Security Policy, that have long urged the use of U.S.
military power against Saddam Hussein’s regime⁽⁵⁾ to
witness such power once again being
employed in what appears to be just another instance of Clintonian dog-wagging. It is bad
enough that the true motivations for the Nation’s actions around the world is now unavoidably
subjected to such second-guessing. Worse yet is the prospect that the United States is
expending immense treasure and jeopardizing lives — both American and innocent Iraqi —
in a military action that is doomed, at best, to be irrelevant and, at worst, will probably
prove counterproductive.

Unfortunately, this prognosis will apply so long as the United States fails to give its bombing
campaigns or other uses of force in Iraq a specific strategic objective — namely the
removal of
Saddam Hussein and his ruling clique from power — and integrates it with other measures that can
make such a goal achievable. Specifically, President Clinton should implement the program
advocated in a letter sent to him last February by a distinguished, bipartisan group led by former
Representative Stephen Solarz (D-NY) and President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Policy, Richard Perle:

• “Recognize a provisional government of Iraq based on the principles and leaders of the Iraqi
  National Congress (INC) that is representative of all the peoples of Iraq.

• “Restore and enhance the safe haven in northern Iraq to allow the provisional government to
  extend its authority there and establish a zone in southern Iraq from which Saddam’s ground
  forces would also be excluded.

• “Lift sanctions in liberated areas. Sanctions are instruments of war against Saddam’s regime,
  but they should be quickly lifted on those who have freed themselves from it. Also, the oil
  resources and products of the liberated areas should help fund the provisional government’s
  insurrection and humanitarian relief for the people of liberated Iraq.

• “Release frozen Iraqi assets — which amount to $1.6 billion in the United States and Britain
  alone — to the control of the provisional government to fund its insurrection. This could be
  done gradually and so long as the provisional government continues to promote a democratic
  Iraq.

• “Facilitate broadcasts from U.S. transmitters immediately and establish a Radio Free Iraq.

• “Help expand liberated areas of Iraq by assisting the provisional government’s offensive
  against
  Saddam Hussein’s regime logistically and through other means.

• “Remove any vestiges of Saddam’s claim to ‘legitimacy’ by, among other things, bringing a
  war crimes indictment against the dictator and his lieutenants and challenging Saddam’s
  credentials to fill the Iraqi seat at the United Nations.

• “Launch a systematic air campaign against the pillars of his power — the Republican Guard
  divisions which prop him up and the military infrastructure that sustains him.

• “Position U.S. ground force equipment in the region so that, as a last resort, we have the
  capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of
  Iraq.”

The Bottom Line

At this point, it cannot be established beyond a reasonable doubt that President Clinton chose
the
day before the House vote on his impeachment to launch a massive attack against Iraq —
something he has been unwilling to do for six years — on the basis of domestic political, rather
than legitimate strategic or military, reasons. A compelling, if circumstantial, case can
certainly be made, however, that this action fits a well-established pattern of wagging the
dog (or “dove”) in a way that seems calculated to advance Mr. Clinton’s personal interests
with little regard for those of the nation he leads.

Virtually every foreign policy initiative — and certainly those involving the use of force —
entail
risks. Attacking terrorists, legitimating despots, fomenting instability in volatile regions and
striking totalitarian regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction cannot be undertaken
lightly, without a careful weighing of possible risks against realistic assessments of the probable
benefits. Serious questions must be asked about the wisdom of taking such actions in cases where
the risks are high and the benefits are debatable. The answers to those questions are all the less
likely to be acceptable in circumstances where the reason for the action appears to have much
more to do with presidential manipulation of the internal U.S. dynamic than external realities.

The prospect that this President may be tempted to take still more rash and
portentous
initiatives overseas the longer he believes that doing so may be the only means by which he
can still influence his fate argues for a speedy resolution of the impeachment process.
For
the good of the country’s security and other foreign policy interests — as well as for the larger
commonweal — it behooves the House of Representatives to get on with it and, assuming the
result is Mr. Clinton’s impeachment, for the Senate to execute its responsibilities with all
deliberate speed.

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1. Questions about the wisdom of and true motivation behind Mr.
Clinton’s action have
intensified amid challenges concerning the intelligence basis for deeming the Sudanese
pharmaceutical plant to be a threat. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
C.W.C. Watch #4:
Sudanese Factory Episode Illuminates Why Chemical Weapons Cannot Be Effectively,
Verifiable Banned (No. 98-D 149, 24 August
1998).

2. See Clinton Legacy Watch # 31: Will This
Damaged Presidency Be Able to Mount, Sustain
Needed Anti-Terror Campaign? (No. 98-D 148, 21
August 1998).

3. See How Not to Forge a Peace
Agreement (No. 98-D 176, 22 October 1998) and
Clinton,
Stay Home! President’s Ill-Advised Trip to Mideast Will Contribute to Conflict — Not a
Durable Peace (No. 98-D 198, 11 December
1998).

4. See Clinton Legacy Watch # 34: A Sovereign
Palestinian State, A Weakened U.S.-Israeli
Relationship, A Greater Danger of War (No. 98-D
199, 14 December 1998).

5. See Onto Baghdad! Liberate Iraq
(No. 91-P 16, 27 February 1991) and On to
Baghdad!
Liberate Iraq (Take Two) (No. 91-P 23, 25
March 1991),