Clinton Legacy Watch # 31: Will This Damaged Presidency Be Able to Mount, Sustain Needed Anti-Terror Campaign?

(Washington, D.C.): Too little is known at this point about the nature — to say nothing of the
efficacy — of the cruise missile strikes launched yesterday by President Clinton against targets in
Afghanistan and Sudan to judge whether they will prove to be more serious and useful than the
pitiful midnight raid he ordered a few years ago against Saddam’s intelligence headquarters.
What can be said is that we had all better hope so, for the stakes are high and the need compelling
for effective strategic action against those like (but not limited to) Osama bin Laden waging
terrorist jihads against the United States.

The President’s Assertions

In his first pronouncement about the attack on facilities in Afghanistan associated with bin
Laden
and a site in Khartoum said to be involved in the manufacture of precursor chemicals for the nerve
gas VX, Mr. Clinton cited four considerations that argued for immediate military action:

“First, because we have convincing evidence these groups played the key role in
the
embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Second, because these groups have
executed terrorist attacks against Americans in the past. Third, because we
have
compelling information that they were planning additional terrorist attacks
against our citizens and others, with the inevitable collateral casualties we saw so
tragically in Africa. And fourth, because they are seeking to acquire chemical
weapons and other dangerous weapons.”

If any one of these assertions are true — to say nothing of all four
— sufficient grounds
would exist for the use of decisive U.S. military force. For example, even in the
absence of
“compelling information” about additional attacks being planned against Americans, bin Laden’s
fatwah would justify prophylactic action. As the Saudi terrorist put it recently: “We
do not
distinguish between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. [The U.S.] will leave [the
Middle East] when the bodies of American soldiers and civilians are sent in the wooden boxes and
coffins. That is when you will leave.” Indeed, the question might well be asked: Why
hasn’t
the Clinton Administration moved against this terrorist cell before now?

As to the particulars of the action finally taken yesterday, the public is obliged, for the
moment at
least, to rely upon the judgment offered by House Speaker Newt Gingrich —
the only member of
the Loyal Opposition apparently kept apprized over the past two weeks of the Administration’s
accumulating evidence and planned response. Speaker Gingrich (who was the 1996 recipient of
the Center for Security Policy’s ‘Keeper of the Flame’ award) declared yesterday that: “I think the
president did exactly the right thing.”

Wagging the Dog?

Unfortunately, the scandals surrounding Mr. Clinton’s personal and official misconduct
inevitably
raise questions in the minds of both Americans and foreigners as to whether this use of military
force is as justified on national security grounds as the President avers. Such suspicions are only
further heightened by the effort mounted yesterday to publicize an operation that the
Administration was reluctant to describe in any detail. As the lead editorial in today’s
Washington
Times caustically observes:

“…Tuning into CNN Thursday, it was hard to avoid the impression that, if not World
War III, then at least something on the scale of Panama or Grenada was going on. The
Administration put on an extraordinary show….Did we really need the high drama of
two briefings from Mr. Clinton, a preliminary briefing at the Vineyard at 2 p.m. and an
Oval Office briefing at 5.30 p.m….? The Oval Office speech offered nothing new, only
a stirring attack on terrorists the world over. Truth to tell, not many Americans need
to be persuaded of their iniquities. Then there were the briefings from the Secretary of
Defense, the Joint Chiefs Chairman, the Secretary of State, the National Security
Adviser. This has to have been the most thoroughly briefed minor military action
in history. Never have so many spoken at such length and said so little.“
(Emphasis
added.)

The Times goes on to contrast this hyper-hyping with the relatively
laid-back way in which
the President and his Administration have addressed various other, recent incidents affecting U.S.
national security or interests.⁽¹⁾ While there can be little
doubt that the preparation of yesterday’s
military actions was underway for some time — a point National Security Advisor Samuel Berger
went to considerable lengths to make yesterday — this Presidency’s demonstrated propensity for
cynical manipulation of the news (including, but not limited to, the use of military assets toward
this end) makes the simultaneity of all this activity with Ms. Lewinsky’s return to the grand jury
appear hardly coincidental.

The truth of the matter is that, until Mr. Clinton resigns from office or is impeached,
it is
probable that virtually every action he takes will be viewed through the prism of well-deserved
skepticism about his true motivations and the validity of his stated rationales.
The Nation can ill-afford to labor under this unnecessary and most undesirable burden —
particularly if it must be prepared to conduct a long-overdue campaign to cripple international
terrorism and/or address other, even more dire threats to U.S. security and interests around the
world.

Other Issues

Yesterday’s military action also serves to showcase a variety of serious national security
problems. These include, among others:

• The Hollowing-out of the U.S. Armed Forces: The cruise missile strikes
  come against a
  backdrop of increasing prospects for combat operations and a serious decline in the readiness
  of America’s military to engage in them.⁽²⁾ Notably, the
  estimated 75-100 cruise missiles (at
  some $750,000 a pop) fired into Afghanistan and Sudan came from the “thin blue line” that is
  now in place to deal with Saddam Hussein’s resurgent belligerence. Just last week, the Clinton
  Administration was citing the presence of such missile assets to support its claim that U.S.
  forces in the region were still adequate to the task of deterring — to say nothing of
  thwarting —
  renewed Iraqi aggression.

The deplorable condition of the U.S. military more generally is also of increasing
concern. For example, consider the lead paragraphs of an article that appeared on the
Washington Post‘s front page on 13 August:

“The Marine Corps is using retreads on its armored vehicles. Rising numbers of Air
Force
and Navy jet fighters are being grounded by spare-parts shortages and maintenance backlogs, and
pilots fed up with repeated duty in the Persian Gulf are bailing out of military service in droves.
At Army training facilities, commanders report that units arriving for exercises have shakier
combat skills than in years past.

“Throughout the military, there is mounting evidence of erosion in America’s combat
strength and troop morale. A decade of downsizing and reduced post-Cold War
defense
spending has coincided with a sharp jump in the number of troop deployments to Bosnia, the
Middle East and elsewhere, straining the armed forces in ways unseen since the last wave
of
defense budget cuts after the Vietnam War.” (Emphasis added.)

• A Contrast With the Administration’s Generally Feckless Approach to Chemical
  Weapons: In attacking the site in Sudan believed to be producing VX precursors, the
  Clinton
  team has, for once, adopted a counter-proliferation approach with some chance of at
  least
  short-term success. This contrasts with its embrace of the Chemical
  Weapons Convention
  (CWC) — a wholly unverifiable international prohibition on the production, stockpiling and use
  of chemical arms that has no chance of preventing any of its signatories (notably,
  Russia and
  China) from covertly retaining chemical weapons if they wish to do so. href=”#N_3_”>⁽³⁾ Naturally, it will
  have even less positive effect on the chemical weapons ambitions of non-signatories
  like
  Sudan, Iraq, Syria and North Korea.⁽⁴⁾

Evidence that bin Laden may have been involved in the Sudanese chemical weapons
program comes amidst reports that Iraq may also be collaborating with the
terrorist-sponsoring regime in Khartoum. Against such threats, arms control is clearly
irrelevant; to the extent the CWC provides a false sense of security that something
practical and effective is being done about the chemical weapons proliferation, it
can actually serve to make matters worse. This is especially true of a treaty
that
requires the transfer of technology with relevance to offensive and defensive chemical
weapons programs to other signatories (which include, in addition to Russia and China,
for example, Iran).

• A Presidential Blindspot on Missile Defense: For the second time in
  recent months,
  President Clinton has emphasized his determination to take steps to protect the American
  people — but only against some threats. A few months ago, he unveiled a major new
  initiative
  to deal with the danger of biological weapons attack. Now, he has launched what he promises
  will be a “campaign to fight terrorism” in the interest of protecting the public from the
  predations of the likes of bin Laden.

Incredibly, Mr. Clinton continues to oppose the deployment of defenses that
would
provide protection against either biological or other terrorist weapons if they
happen to be delivered by ballistic missile. As the recently completed report by
the
bipartisan, blue-ribbon Rumsfeld Commission makes clear, the evidence continues to
accumulate that such a danger is a question of when — not if.

The attached editorial from today’s Wall Street
Journal correctly takes the
President to task for his arms control-driven myopia about the coming missile
threat and urges anew for the deployment of defensive measures that will do much
to protect against both biological weapons and the state-sponsors and other
terrorists who will wield them in the future. This editorial makes the particularly
salutary point that the United States freedom to act in the future against terrorist-sponsoring
states like Afghanistan and Sudan will be gravely circumscribed as
they — or their allies — acquire the ballistic missiles and weapons of mass
destruction with which to deter U.S. military operations.

The Bottom Line

Nothing in this President’s temperament, background or tenure in office gives reason to
believe
that he is capable of conceptualizing, let alone of executing, the sort of patient, sustained and
disciplined counter-terrorism campaign the Nation now requires. It can only be hoped that he will
find it in himself to mount such an effort — including the integral steps discussed above needed to
put the U.S. military back in fighting trim, to combat effectively chemical weapons and other
forms of proliferation and to deploy capable anti-missile systems. And if Mr. Clinton cannot or
will not do so, we must earnestly hope that the United States will shortly come to be led by
someone else who will.

– 30 –

1. As the Times put it: “May we compare Mr. Clinton’s
behavior to his reaction when the two
embassies were actually bombed August 7? At the time, he was in Aspen, Colo., fund-raising and
golfing. He certainly didn’t feel a need to break off his trip. Or his reaction when the Capitol Hill
shootings took place on July 24. At that time, Mr. Clinton was fund-raising in the South. He did
agree to shorten his trip by a day to be home for the memorial services. Or think back to the
beginning of the NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs in Bosnia in August 1995, the
largest bombing campaign of his career — in fact, the largest bombing campaign in Europe since
World War II. Unlike the strike Thursday, that campaign even involved airplanes. With pilots.
At the time, Mr. Clinton was vacationing with his family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He
displayed no urgency to return to Washington.”

2. For more on the declining readiness of the U.S. military, see the
Center’s Decision Briefs
entitled Clinton Legacy Watch # 22: More Evidence of A Hollow
Military (No. 98-D 62, 7
April 1998) and ‘Excessive Shrinkage’ Warning: Cuts In U.S. Navy Force
Structure Risk
America’s Global Interests (No. 98-D 48, 17 March
1998).

3. Even the Deputy Director of the Organization for the Prohibition
of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW), John Gee, has recently been obliged to acknowledge myriad examples of non-compliant
behavior. For example, in an article published in the July 1998 edition of The Arena,
Gee
acknowledges that nearly two-thirds of the signatories have failed to provide initial declarations as
required. There have also been huge discrepancies in reports concerning the transfer of Schedule
2 and Schedule 3 chemicals (i.e., chemicals that could be used to manufacture chemical weapons
or could be adapted to serve such a purpose.)

4. For more on the shortcomings of the CWC, see the Center’s
Decision Briefs entitled C.W.C.
Watch #3: U.S. Underestimating The Costs of One Ineffective Ban; Will It Repeat Them In
Another? (No. 98-D 5, 1 January 1998),
C.W.C. Watch # 2: After First Six Months, Fears
About Treaty’s Unverifiability, Unjustified Costs & Ineffectiveness
Vindicated (No. 97-D 163,
1 November 1997).