‘BAIT AND SWITCH’: CLINTON’S CYNICAL FOREIGN POLICY MACHINATIONS DISSERVE U.S. INTERESTS, VOTERS

(Washington, D.C.): Rarely have U.S. national
interests and the American electorate been more
shamelessly manipulated than by President Clinton in the
run-up to the 1994 mid-term elections. In a panicky bid
to end his free-fall in job approval ratings and to
staunch the hemorrhage in popular support for Democratic
candidates, Mr. Clinton has tried to “buy”
short-term foreign policy successes all over the world.

It is a measure of the Clinton Administration’s
desperation — a quality fully appreciated by those
foreign governments with whom it is dealing — that
the United States is paying top dollar for the most
ephemeral of deals. The result will surely be
early reverses in most, if not all of these areas,
reverses that may ultimately cost the United States
dearly.

In fact, as the attached
column by the Center for Security Policy’s director,
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., which appeared in today’s Washington
Times observes, some of these so-called
“foreign policy successes” have already begun
to unravel — even before the election!
Despite Mr. Clinton’s efforts to accentuate the positive,
the bankruptcy of his policy of appeasing ruthless
dictators has begun to evidence itself from the Persian
Gulf to the Korean peninsula, from Peking to Port au
Prince.

The most patent example of this odious practice of
subordinating national interests to the President’s
personal political priorities was unveiled today. The
Pentagon announced that 13,800 ground forces would be
returned home from Kuwait and Haiti before Christmas. In
a front-page story, the Washington Post laid
bare the Administration’s cynicism. It described how
“White House officials” overruled a public
announcement of this action by the Defense Department two
days before the election on the grounds that “it
would look as though it had too political a
motivation.” The Post went on to say,
however, that “Administration officials, when
queried, were willing, nonetheless, to provide full
details of the withdrawal on a background,
not-for-attribution basis.” (Emphasis added.) In
other words, an action that is too politically
motivated was leaked to the press so as to secure the
benefits of such manipulation while minimizing the risks
of getting caught at it.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy believes that pulling
U.S. ground forces out of Iraq without having in any
way dealt with the problem — i.e., Saddam
Hussein — that caused them to be rushed there at
considerable expense (not the least of which arises from
breaking the seals on pre-positioned equipment) is
a formula for having to rush them back once again at some
point in the near future. Similarly, promising
to withdraw a substantial number of U.S. troops from
Haiti while the situation there remains, according to the
U.N. special envoy for Haiti, too dangerous to put in
international peacekeeping forces is a step that is
likely to result in Americans and/or Jean Bertrande
Aristide (who depends entirely on their protection for
his survival) getting killed.

It seems a bankable proposition that both of
these pre-election actions will have to be reversed,
either before they are undertaken or shortly thereafter.
The Center hopes that the American people will not be
deceived by either of them, or by other manifestations of
Mr. Clinton’s sophistry in foreign affairs. The public
should, instead, start holding him — and those who
currently extol his “successes” in this area —
fully accountable now, rather than doing so only
when his proverbial chickens come home to roost.