The other character issue

By: Frank Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times, October 15, 1996

Rumor has it Bob Dole has decided
that tomorrow night’s debate will be used
to address with some directness the host
of President Clinton’s ethical, moral and
legal liabilities that have generically
come to be known by the euphemism the
“character issue.” While he is
at it, I hope Mr. Dole will use this last
debate to explore another family of
problems — the host of potential security
policy crises arising from the
“character” of Mr. Clinton’s
leadership, one or more of which may well
confront whomever is president during the
next four years. Consider the following
illustrative list:

• National nakedness
  to missile threats: The Clinton-Gore
  administration has determinedly prevented
  the prompt deployment of defenses against
  ballistic missile attack. In the event
  the present crisis on the Korean
  peninsula escalates into an attack by the
  North against the South, Pyongyang’s last
  patron — China — may seek to deter a U.S.
  response by renewing warnings of nuclear
  strikes against Los Angeles (or perhaps
  other U.S. cities) first issued late last
  year.

Even before North Korea obtains its
own missiles capable of attacking the
United States, the prospect of that sort
of strategic checkmate might be all the
incentive a psychopathic regime in the
midst of its death throes needs to
undertake a deadly strike against its
enemy to the south. What priority will
the next president give to precluding
this and similar dangers of nuclear
blackmail by defending America against
missile attack?

• A no-win situation
  in Bosnia: After three years of President
  Clinton’s malign neglect and feckless
  diplomacy — whose principal result seems
  to have been needlessly to compound the
  horrific consequences of the war and to
  have enabled radical Iranians to secure a
  key beachhead on the continent of Europe
  — the administration decided to broker
  “peace agreements” in Dayton.

These accords were doomed, however,
to have the results now in evidence: war
criminals still at large and, to varying
degrees, still calling the shots;
fraudulent elections that have served to
legitimate the grabs for power by extreme
Muslim, Serb and Croat nationalists; and
the preparation for renewed conflict over
the permanent partition, if not the de
facto liquidation of Bosnia as soon as
the international peacekeepers depart.
This prospect, in turn, is likely to
translate into a Hobson’s choice between
a costly, open-ended commitment of many
thousands of American troops to the
region or withdrawing and unleashing the
violence deferred by the multi-billion
dollar investment that will have to be
written off. How will the next president
address such an unpalatable choice?

• Russian junk
  bonds: Studied Western efforts to ignore
  the implications of Russia’s worsening
  political and economic conditions have
  been characterized by repeated financial
  concessions worth many billions of
  dollars to U.S. and European taxpayers.
  These have taken the form of
  undisciplined International Monetary Fund
  loans, credit guarantees, insurance
  coverage and other contingent
  liabilities. Most recently, virtually at
  the same moment that President Boris
  Yeltsin felt compelled to issue a dire
  warning about the repercussions of
  continued, wholesale tax-cheating by
  Russian companies (including some that
  are government-owned) and private
  citizens, U.S. and European credit-rating
  agencies have given the Kremlin an
  astoundingly high rating.

As a result, Russian financial
instruments that will likely give a new
meaning to the term “junk
bonds” will begin to find their way
into European — and, in due course,
American — pension and mutual funds,
insurance company and private portfolios.
The result could be to expose untold
millions of investors in the West and, in
turn, their governments to geostrategic
extortion in the event Moscow chooses to
exert it in future crises. Will the next
president act to curb such unwarranted
taxpayer exposure to the Kremlin or
exacerbate it, as has been the wont of
the Clinton-Gore team?

• Meltdown in Cuba:
  If Fidel Castro and his friends in Russia
  have their way, within the next four
  years, at least one of two dangerously
  flawed nuclear reactors being built in
  Cuba will come on-line. Defectors and
  many Western experts have long warned
  that, if they do so, there will
  inevitably be a Chernobyl-style
  catastrophe — one which might spew deadly
  levels of radiation over many millions of
  Americans across the southern parts of
  the United States. What steps will the
  next president take to ensure that
  Castro’s regime is never able to pose
  such a nuclear danger to this country?
• Israel’s new
  peril: The recent wave of violence by the
  Palestinian proto-army equipped with
  automatic weapons, thanks to the Oslo
  peace accords, is a bitter foretaste of
  what is to come. While Clinton-sponsored
  diplomatic prestidigitation may postpone
  the next outbreak, it will likely simply
  mean that the next upheaval is still more
  deadly. After all, such temporizing would
  mean that the Palestinian Arab forces are
  that much larger and stronger, their
  freedom of action in territory
  surrendered by the Israelis that much
  greater, and the recognition of de facto
  (if not de jure) Palestinian statehood
  that much more universal. These factors
  would inevitably complicate Israel’s
  efforts to contain — let alone eliminate
  — the source of the violence. Will the
  next American president insist on
  increasing this danger to Israel? Or will
  he faithfully support the Jewish state as
  it seeks peace with security, even if
  that entails a major redirection, and
  possible rupture, of the “peace
  process”?
• The “Islamic
  Bomb”: Russian plans to transfer
  nuclear technology to Iran and Chinese
  actions that are already doing the same
  for Pakistan are giving new impetus to
  the collaborative bid these countries
  (and others like Algeria) have been
  making in recent years to acquire
  thermonuclear weapons. The Clinton
  administration has largely looked the
  other way on this emerging danger. What
  will the next president do to try to stop
  it?

These are, admittedly, hard
questions. Whether we like it or not,
though, the man elected in November to
lead this country for the next four years
is going to have to answer them. We are
better off knowing now just how he
intends to do so.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the
director of the Center for Security
Policy and a columnist for the Washington
Times.