The linked video is an interview with a Fox News reporter and former President Bill Clinton regarding Clinton’s failure to act on Osama Bin Laden. I could care less about the political leanings, or the Fox bashing that occurs - my question is this: Clinton asserts he couldn’t rally support to go after Bin Laden during his administration. How can a POTUS not be able to command his troops? Or does he mean without Congressional approval? Or is it because he was involved in so many foreign spats at the time?
The President has executive authority…within the limits established by the laws passed by the Congress. Clinton could have pursued Osama bin Laden ex ab extra, which is a well worn pattern established from Eisenhower on, but for good or bad, he did what he did. I don’t regard Clinton has being a particularly competent exec, but until after 11 September 2001, there just wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm, even among the Bush Administration, for going after bin Laden or other radical Muslim mujahadeen elements.
Remember, we’re always preparing for the last war and the previous enemy. Which is why we are of focused on Islamic terrorist groups while Russia rearms in front of us.
The book I read about CIA activities in the middle East said that they had a couple opportunities to take out Bin Laden with cruise missiles in the 90’s but could not get the green light from Clinton due to possible collateral damage.
There’s also the limits of what is possible. A President can’t just say “I want bin Laden dead. Make it so.” We spend ten years going trying to get bin Laden after 9-11 when there was a lot more commitment to the mission.
Huh? As I remember it, Clinton actually did attempt to take out Bin Laden with a cruise missile, and hit an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, although Bin Laden himself was not hurt.
Of course, the upshot was that Clinton came in for a lot of criticism for authorizing the action, because the US public and congress did not care about Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda at the time.
In reality, Clinton authorized this air strike (as well as a strike against Sudan, where a presumed chemical weapons plant turned out to be a baby milk factory…oops) immediately after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke wide open. It was a classic “Wag the Dog” moment, which obviously didn’t work very well.
As I recall, bin Laden was hawking with members of the royal family of Ratsnestistan or a similar country, and there would have been your basic international repercussions had any of them been killed as well.
Please. First of all, Bush wasn’t even president for 10 years. And secondly, I think we can all differentiate between what Bush might have said to cover his ass vs what he really hoped to do. The first bit of intelligence that actually led to Abbottabad was gleaned in 2007 while Bush was still president.
This was one of the factors working against Clinton: he made a real attempt to get bin Laden and everybody insisted it was an attempt to distract Congress and the public. In politics some people will insist everything is a distraction from whatever they want to bash you about. This “wag the dog” moment came a couple of days after he admitted his affair, but it was also only two weeks after the embassy bombings. And yet 16 years later, you can see buddha_david remembers the timing of the Lewinsky affair and not the bombings of two embassies that killed 200+ people. I’m sure he’s far from the only one. In point of fact this may have been the closest anybody came to actually killing bin Laden until 2011. Unfortunately he either wasn’t at the targeted camps that day or he left one of the locations a few hours before the missile strikes. It’s certainly true that there was not much political will for going hard after Al Qaeda at that time and that anything Clinton did was going to be viewed with suspicion because it was 1998 and nobody in power could think of anything more important. You could argue that that was Clinton’s own fault and that he had a responsibility to do it anyway even if he was going to get nothing but shit for it. That doesn’t mean he would have succeeded in getting bin Laden, but I think you can say he could’ve done more since his administration clearly realized Al Qaeda was a growing threat.
What he really wanted to do was leave bin Laden alone; he repeatedly made that clear. One of his first acts as President was to call off the Clinton-era hunt for him, and later after 9-11 Congress had to coerce him into re-starting efforts to catch bin Laden after he’d called the hunt off yet again. He clearly never cared about catching him.
It’s not a coincidence that Osama wasn’t killed until Bush was out of office; Obama did care about seeing Osama hunted down, so he was.
On August 21, 1998, Clinton ordered a Tomahawk missile strike on Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for Al Qaida’s bombing of the US embassies in East Africa. This came shortly after Clinton testified for a grand jury on the Lewinsky affair.
In December 1998, Operation Desert Fox was launched against Iraq which basically involved several days of bombing because of Saddam Hussein’s non-cooperation with UN Inspectors. It occurred during the House of Representatives debate on impeachment of Clinton.
I’m having trouble finding press articles from 1998, but there was substantial criticism at the time that the attacks were motivated to take attention off the Lewinksy matter. I’m not going to watch the YouTube video, but my guess is that Clinton is claiming that he was politically chasened to taking further military action against bin Laden because the threat he posed was not all that well understood by many people.
As a sidebar, after Clinton was acquitted of impeachment charges in early 1999, the United States led a long series of air strikes against Serbia in the spring and early summer of 1999.
