Bill Clinton Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks.

Over the weekend, former president Bill Clinton got into a unseemly and very unpresidential on-air tiff with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. The subject: Clinton's handling of al Qaeda during his administration. In response to the question "Did you do enough to connect the dots and go after al Qaeda," Clinton argued that "We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody's gotten since." Clinton went on to claim that "I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it, but I did try and I did everything I thought I responsibly could."

From everything I know about this, Clinton is here at best putting positive spin on the events in question and at worst commiting an outright lie to bolster his presidency. In his defense, Clinton referred to Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, written by Richard Clarke, the former White House head of counter-terror efforts under Clinton. However, as Byron York points out, Clarke's book pretty much supports the conventional wisdom: that the Clinton Administration passed on several chances to either apprehend or kill bin Laden during the 1990s. Quoting from York:

Judging by Clarke’s sympathetic account — as well as by the sympathetic accounts of other former Clinton aides like Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon — it’s not quite accurate to say that Clinton tried to kill bin Laden. Rather, he tried to convince — as opposed to, say, order — U.S. military and intelligence agencies to kill bin Laden. And when, on a number of occasions, those agencies refused to act, Clinton, the commander-in-chief, gave up. Clinton did not give up in the sense of an executive who gives an order and then moves on to other things, thinking the order is being carried out when in fact it is being ignored. Instead, Clinton knew at the time that his top military and intelligence officials were dragging their feet on going after bin Laden and al Qaeda. He gave up rather than use his authority to force them into action....

On page 223, Clarke describes a meeting, in late 2000, of the National Security Council “principals” — among them, the heads of the CIA, the FBI, the Attorney General, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretaries of State, Defense. It was just after al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole. But neither the FBI nor the CIA would say that al Qaeda was behind the bombing, and there was little support for a retaliatory strike. Clarke quotes Mike Sheehan, a State Department official, saying in frustration, “What’s it going to take, Dick? Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell they won’t even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”...

So Clinton couldn’t get the job done. Why not? According to Clarke’s pro-Clinton view, the president was stymied by Republican opposition. “Weakened by continual political attack,” Clarke writes, “[Clinton] could not get the CIA, the Pentagon, and FBI to act sufficiently to deal with the threat.”...

But the bottom line is that Bill Clinton, the commander-in-chief, could not find the will to order the military into action against al Qaeda, and Bill Clinton, the head of the executive branch, could not find the will to order the CIA and FBI to act. No matter what the former president says on Fox, or anywhere else, that is his legacy in the war on terror.

York's argument supports the general argument of what is, in my view, the best book on the US's efforts to deal with al Qaeda in the 1990s, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll. Coll identifies several opportunities when the US had chances to deal with al Qaeda and bin Laden, and chose not to. For example, on p. 323, Coll details the question of whether Sudan offered to arrest bin Laden and hand him over to the US. While it's unclear if the offer was made, Coll is clear that it wasn't clear if the US would take bin Laden if the opportunity to arrest him existed. The problem: lack of evidence. Coll cites Sandy Berger as saying "he knew of no intelligence at the time showing that bin Laden had committed any crimes against Americans." Throughout the book, Coll highlights instances where insufficient attention, hestiation and confusion, or simple unwillingness meant that opportunities to arrest or kill bin Laden were passed up.

Does this mean that Clinton is, as his self-defense indicates he believes himself to be accused, to blame to some degree for 9/11? Not exactly. I believe Clinton is correct when he says that he tried to deal with bin Laden and did everything he believed he could reasonably do. But what Clinton can be blamed for is not recognizing the situation for what it was to become and not changing the nature of the dialogue within and without the American government. As president, it was incumbent on Clinton to move the country away from thinking about bin Laden, al Qaeda, and terrorism as a law enforcement problem. The US was attacked 4 times under Clinton's watch (the first WTC bombing, the US embassies in Africa, the Marine barracks in Saudi Arabia, and the USS Cole) and the American response consisted of a few arrests and the destruction of a pharmecuetical plant in Sudan and a few tents in Afghanistan. Clinton certainly did not willfully ignore the problem of Islamic terrorism, but he also did not recognize it for was it was, nor did he, in the words of York, order the military into action against al Qaeda or the CIA and FBI to act. Clinton's pathetic defensive response seems to indicate that he is well aware of this.