Foreign policy success shrinkage

BY: Frank Gaffney
The Washington Times, November 7, 1994

Even before the polls open, the early returns are coming in on President Clinton’s desperate bid for the political rehabilitation needed to stave off his expected, massive repudiation in balloting tomorrow. Across the board, Mr. Clinton’s "string of foreign policy successes" is coming unraveled.

That it was bound to — given the short-term, expediency-driven nature of the president’s "solutions" — is not news; that it is beginning to do so now, prior to the elections is remarkable. The question is: Will Mr. Clinton’s disservice to American interests overseas be broadly enough perceived by the electorate to be added to the litany of grievances expressed tomorrow against the President and his friends?

A tour of the horizon offers powerful reasons why it should. Consider recent developments in each of the areas Mr. Clinton has been taking credit for:

• Iraq: While the Clinton administration did swiftly and credibly signal to Saddam Hussein that it would resist any further military threat to Kuwait from Iraq, the plausibility of that commitment is rapidly fraying. The idea of creating a heavy weapons exclusion zone in Southern Iraq as a means of precluding a renewed Iraqi buildup there was quashed by the French and Russians. Worse yet, this diplomatic debacle offered fresh evidence of the untenability of the international sanctions regime against Iraq.

Then, during his photo op. in Kuwait week before last, Mr. Clinton signaled he expected to have the troops now stationed there home by Christmas. Unless he is planning to take out Saddam in the intervening eight weeks — and there is no basis for believing that is what the president has in mind — Mr. Clinton will either have to abandon his pre-election commitment or abandon the field yet again to the Iraqi despot.

• Haiti: The thousands of U.S. troops with responsibility for maintaining Jean-Bertrande Aristide in power were understandably angry at discovering that their military colleagues sent to deter Saddam well after operations began in Haiti would be repatriated first. The administration’s pre-election response? Promise to pull out 9,000 of the roughly 17,000 now there before Christmas and fobbing the bulk of the nasty, protracted business of "nation-building" off onto multinational forces. Unfortunately, as the U.N. special envoy for Haiti noted last week, the island is not safe enough for international peacekeepers; he will not agree to put them in until the United States has further "pacified" the country. Here too, the writing is on the wall: There will either be more American troops in Haiti for longer than the Clinton administration has indicated or Mr. Aristide will have to be abandoned to his fate.
• North Korea: When the Clinton administration’s deal with Pyongyang was first unveiled, it was obvious that the accord entailed immense U.S. concessions to one of the most dangerous communist regimes on Earth. Not the least of these were the untold billions of dollars for oil, reactors, nuclear fuel and upgrades to the North’s power grid that will be entailed. To allay criticism somewhat, official American spokesmen maintained that these costs would be borne substantially, if not entirely, by others.

The White House was obliged to acknowledge in recent days, however, that Mr. Clinton has sent the North Koreans a letter saying he will do everything in his power to ensure that the U.S. taxpayer assumes these costs if other nations cannot be induced to do so — something that seems increasingly probable. Congress and the public may well refuse to go along with this deal insofar as it amounts to what might be called "strategic rape." They certainly should if the president winds up adding insult to injuring by obliging the U.S. taxpayer to pay for it.

• Syria: President Clinton made a hastily arranged trip to Damascus — the capital of a nation that: sponsors international terrorism against Americans and their allies; promotes drug trafficking that destroys American lives; is acquiring weapons of mass destruction that may well be used in the future against a key U.S. ally, Israel; and engages in economic warfare against the United States by counterfeiting its currency. He did so in the hope of achieving a politically valuable pre-election "breakthrough" in peace negotiations between Israel and Syria. Although no such breakthrough occurred, the president nonetheless claimed that significant (albeit unspecified) "progress" was made.

At present, it is unclear whether Mr. Clinton was merely contemptuously snubbed by the Syrian despot, Hafez Assad, or whether Mr. Assad has pocketed other, more substantive concessions than a symbolic presidential pilgrimage to Damascus. These might include not only committing U.S. troops to a dangerous deployment on the Golan Heights but also sweetheart deals for Syria concerning U.S. trade, technology and financial assistance. Either way, the trip was ill advised and counterproductive.

This list of prematurely declared "successes" is illustrative of the larger problem with the Clinton security policy record. In due course if not tomorrow, the critical swing group of voters – the Reagan Democrats — are going to vote against Clinton and Company. These voters will do so for the same reasons they rejected the last Southern Democratic president, Jimmy Carter: They have no use for leaders who squander America’s prestige and reduce its power and who, in the process, embolden U.S. adversaries at the expense of our interests overseas.

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