Clinton's speech in Britain... what did you think?

[Avalonian]

No doubt this will eventually devolve into a rote comparison of Clinton’s various merits and faults, but I’m particularly interested in what people think of the speech he recently gave in Great Britain.

You can read a transcript of the whole thing on Salon.com

I was amazed at how reasonable Clinton was, and how persuasive. Funny and personable, I think he did a great job summarizing the situation we’re in now, both domestically and internationally, and outlining some workable, sensible solutions. This is something Gore has failed to do in his exaggerated criticisms of Bush, but also something Bush has failed to do with all of his drum-beating talk of Dubya-A-R.

The whole speech is quite substantive and moving in parts, but a few excerpts are in order…

You cannot have an integrated world and have your say all the time. And America can lead the world towards that, but we cannot dominate and run the world in that direction. There is a big difference.

Military action should always be a last resort, for three reasons; because today Saddam Hussein has all the incentive in the world not to use or give these weapons away, but with certain defeat he would have all the incentive to do just that. Because a preemptive action today, however well justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future. And because I have done this, I have ordered these kinds of actions. I do not care how precise your bombs and your weapons are – when you set them off, innocent people will die.

Much of the power that we can have grows out of the power of our example. We can’t tell people to make a more integrated world unless they think we are making more integrated societies. Unless all of our children have a chance to get a decent education; unless we have balanced the demands for freedom and security; unless we have absorbed our immigrants in a way that is consistent with our values, and the elemental obligations we have for equal opportunity. We cannot do good abroad unless we are good at home.

Refusing to be told we have to choose between what’s good for labor and good for business and say the best thing is if both do well. Refusing to be told that crime policy has to be about prevention or punishment and saying what works is both. That education has to be about excellence or equity; that health care has to be about access or quality; that environmental protection can only come at the expense of economic growth. All these things are factually untrue, but they dominate, control and paralyze the politics of countries all over the world.

It may sound corny, but in his words I saw the difference between leadership and bullying, the latter of which seems to be Bush’s preferred method. I see what I’ve been missing the last two years, with a “leader” who chooses the simplistic, lowbrow route because its the only way that he understands. Bush’s muddled, content-free speeches seem like (or are) so much wasted breath compared to Clinton’s words.

I still don’t think that much of Clinton as an individual… as a man I don’t want to emulate him. But ye Gods, how I miss him as a leader. His words inspire me while Bush’s lackluster rhetoric either infuriates or saddens me. Clinton’s words give me hope for what we can be as a nation, while Bush makes me fear what we may become. Clinton speaks to our potential, while Bush speaks to the status quo… I prefer our potential.

Yeah… good speech.

[JohnBckWLD]

Even though Tony Blair went google eyed as his jaw dropped…It’s a marked improvement from this onegiven on 11/7/2001 at Georgetown University

…Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told to today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it. Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were, quite frequently, killed even though they were innocent. This country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human and we are still paying the price today. Even in the 20th century in America people were terrorized or killed because of their race. And even today, though we have continued to walk, sometimes to stumble, in the right direction, we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history…

…On the other hand, if you live in a poor country or you are more pessimistic you might have answered one of four negative things. You could have said, “No, no, you got it wrong about the economy. Global poverty will dominate the early 21st century because half the world’s people aren’t in this global economy.” They live on less than two dollars a day, a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, a billion and a half people never get a clean glass of water, and one woman dies every minute in childbirth. And that’s a recipe for explosion, and that will dominate the world. Or you might have said, "No, before that happens, the environmental crises will consume us. The shortage of water, the deterioration of the oceans from which we get our oxygen, and most of all global warming. If the earth warms for the next 50 years at the rate of the last ten, we’ll lose fifty feet of Manhattan Island. The Florida Everglades I worked so hard to save. Whole Pacific Island nations will be flooded, and tens of millions of food refugees will be created, destabilizing governments and causing violence. Or you could have said, "Well, no, before global warming gets us the epidemics will. All over the world public health systems are crashing down, and just to take AIDS as an example, there are now over 36 million AIDS cases, 22 million people have already died. If we don’t turn the trend around there will be 100 million AIDS cases in five years, making it the worst epidemic since the Plague swept Europe in the 14th century and killed one in four people. And the fastest growing rates are in the former Soviet Union on Europe’s back door, and the second fastest growing rates are in the Caribbean on our front door, and the third fastest growing rates are in India, the biggest democracy in the world. And the Chinese just admitted they had twice as many cases as they had previously thought, and only four percent of the adults in our biggest nation know how AIDS is contracted and spread. So today, two thirds of the cases are in Africa. Tomorrow, it’s everybody’s problem, unless we turn it around. Or you might have said even on September the 10th, if you’d been keeping up with this, “No, no, no, even before the health crises. We will be consumed by terrorism, by the marriage of modern weapons of destruction to ancient racial, religious and tribal hatreds.”…

[ElJeffe]

Well, this speech wasn’t nearly as self-consciously narcisstic as his usual speeches - he only made references to his accomplishments a few times. I also appreciated his honesty:

…I will take credit for any good thing I can these days.

That being said, I would like to point out how wonderful it must be to have the luxury of describing utopian ideals without the shackles of pragmatism holding you down. And also, how I love having a leader who spends more time doing and less time talking about doing. And lastly… my GOD, that man is long-winded. He desperately needs to hire an editor for his speechwriter. I think you could throw out 2 of every 3 paragraphs and not lose a thing.

Jeff

[Sam_Stone]

Let’s also remember that his own administration went against the security council to intervene in Serbia. And his administration disgracefully left 800,000 people in Rwanda to be hacked to death with machetes and picks. I’m still shocked that that disaster didn’t leave more of a taint on the Clinton administration.

[David_Simmons]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
**Let’s also remember that his own administration went against the security council to intervene in Serbia. And his administration disgracefully left 800,000 people in Rwanda to be hacked to death with machetes and picks. I’m still shocked that that disaster didn’t leave more of a taint on the Clinton administration. **

Politics is the art of the possible. How much increase in taxes and possible US casulaties would you have tolerated in order to save lives in Rwanda, Sam?

[RedFury]

Repug logic. I get it.

Bad if he does – Serbia – bad if he doesn’t – Rwanda. Nothing like killing them all and be done with it.

As for “hiring an editor,” hey! easier than buying a brain – which is all the rage with the current usurper.

[mangeorge]

I liked Clinton’s speech. Yes, he can be long-winded. But I don’t get the feeling someone’s whispering in his ear.
Peace,
mangeorge

[JDM]

*Originally posted by JohnBckWLD *
**Even though Tony Blair went google eyed as his jaw dropped…It’s a marked improvement from this onegiven on 11/7/2001 at Georgetown University

**

Thanks for reminding me of the Georgetown speech- I went back and reread it and was very impressed- even more than the first time I read it. You, of course, used the mediawhore tactic of out-of-context quoting to attack it, so I will supply the missing peices:

Before your first quote, Clinton said:

Look at us and you will see how more diverse America has grown in the last thirty plus years. The terrorists killed people who came to America not to die, but dream, from every continent, from dozens of countries, most every religion on the face of the earth, including in large numbers Islam. They, those that died in New York, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, are part of a very different world and a very different worldview than those who killed them. Now I would submit to you that we are now in a struggle with the soul of the 21st century and the world in which you students live and raise your own children and make your own way. I believe that there are several things that as Americans we ought to do and I would like to outline them in a fairly direct fashion.
First, we have to win the fight we are in and in that I urge you to keep three things in mind. First of all, terror, the killing of noncombatants for economic, political, or religious reasons has a very long history as long as organized combat itself, and yet, it has never succeeded as a military strategy standing on its own, but it has been around a long time. Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless…

and before your second quote he said:

Imagine yourself on September the 10th. Nothing’s happened on September 11th. Try to remember how you viewed the world on September 10th. If I had asked you on that day, “What is the single most dominant element of the 21st Century world,” what would your answer have been? What would you have said? Since you’re living here and we’ve been doing reasonable well the last few years, I can think of one of four answers you might have given if you’re a positive sort of person. You might have said, “Well, the global economy.” The globalization of the economy is the most dominant element because it’s made America 22 and a half million jobs and it’s lifted more people out of poverty in the last thirty years than were ever lifted out in all of human history. Or you might have said, “No, it’s the information technology revolution because that’s what’s given us all the productivity that has driven the economic growth.” When I became president in January of '93 there were only fifty sites on the worldwide web. When I left office there were 350 million. In eight years. Today, before the Anthrax scare, there were thirty times as many messages transmitted by email as the postal services every day in America. Or you might have said, “Oh, no, as impressive as those things are, the most significant thing about the early 21st century will be the advances in biological sciences.” It will rival the significance of the discovery of DNA. It will rival the significance of Newtonian physics. We sequenced the human genome; we’re developing microscopic testing mechanisms. Soon we’ll be able to identify cancers when they’re just a few cells in size. Soon we’ll be able to give young mothers gene cards to take home with their newborn babies and in countries with good health systems, children will have life expectancies in excess of ninety years. Or you might have said, if you’re like me and you’re into politics and this kind of thing, you might have said, "No, the most important thing about the modern world is the growth of democracy and diversity, because that is the environment within which all the economic growth, all the technological growth, and all the scientific advances flourish best. I was honored to be president at the first time in history when more than half the world’s people lived under governments of their own choosing, and when America, as witnessed by your presence here today, and other advanced countries became far more diverse racially, ethnically, and religiously than ever before, and the societies were actually working, and working better, and I might add, a lot more interesting because of our diversity. So, you could have said any of that.
On the other hand, if you live in a poor country…

What is it that you find wrong with the speech? I think it is actually a better speech than the one in Britain (which was also a pretty damn good speech- I saw it on the BBC). JDM

[DSeid]

Let’s face it, the only reason he survived his scandals was that he was damn good at his job … he was able to be an intellectual heavyweight while coming off as a good ole boy … he had a way of presenting a reasoned analysis in such a way as to make everyone think that they already knew that themselves. To get across complex concepts in the era of ten second sound bites. Damn what a communicator.

Unlike Gore who aint as smart as he thinks he is (and is always coming off as the guy who wants to prove that he is as smart as he thinks he is) or Dubya who probably aint as dumb as we think he is (but is always sounding even dumber).

[manhattan]

*Originally posted by David Simmons *
**

Politics is the art of the possible. How much increase in taxes and possible US casulaties would you have tolerated in order to save lives in Rwanda, Sam? **

It was eminently doable at a relatively low cost in both dollars and U.S. lives. Clinton knows this – when I saw him he described missing the signals in Rwanda as one of his biggest regrets.

[MrThompson]

Well, both speeches impressed me… maybe I’m easily swayed by anyone who isn’t Bush.

[CyberPundit]

I thought it was an excellent speech. It echoes many of Robert Wright’s ideas about the growing and inevitable interdependence of the world across many dimensions and the need to fashion institutions to tackle both the problems and opportunities that creates. This is not surprising;. apparently Clinton read Wright’s book, Non-Zero, and was highly impressed. Of course Clinton is brilliant at packaging those ideas in a convincing and clear manner and he was probably even more impressive in person than the text suggests. At the end of Clinton’s presidency, IIRC David Broder said that Clinton was still a relatively young man and that his post-Presidential life might be even more important than his Presidency. If he keeps making speeches like this one, he could remain one of the most influential public figures in the world for many years.

BTW the positive reception to the speech, in Britain also exposes the conservative lie that Europe and the European Left especially are reflexively opposed to America and Americans. In fact it is only to the American Right that Europeans are opposed. The huge popularity of Clinton in Europe and around the world and Kennedy before him suggests that Europeans respond positively to American leadership when it marries genuine idealism with good sense. Conservatives want to pretend otherwise in order to hide how their particular policies and rhetoric isolates the the US around the world.

[ralph124c]

The con man is alive and well! Clinton conveniently forgets that HE is responsible for much of the disorder that GWB has inherited. Maybe if we hadn’t caused so much death and suffering to the Serbian people (our allies in TWO world wars), on behalf of albanian-muslim terrorists, we would have been spared the awful events of 9/11. I find it incerdible that nobody has ever issued a serious analysis of the Clinton presidency. The fact is, Clinto did bupkus/nada/nothing. His inaction gave the muslim terrorists the encouragement they needed to attack the US, and now, Clinton isn’t even willing to accept any of the blame!

[Sam_Stone]

Clinton didn’t ‘miss signals’ in Rwanda - he missed the increasingly frantic pleas of the U.N. representative in Rwanda who was BEGGING for support. Support that he had been promised, and which was used to convince the Rwandans that they wouldn’t be attacked.

800,000 dead. And it wouldn’t have taken an invasion to protect them, or a gigantic military presence. They were killed by mobs, for God’s sake. Hacked to death with machetes and picks.

It was also Kofi Annan’s worst moment, as he looked the other way when his own representative pleaded for help.

[CyberPundit]

Do you seriously believe that Dubya would have behaved differently in Rwanda? Didn’t he explictly say in the debates that he didn’t believe in military interventions for purely humanitarian purposes (whereas Gore said he would intervene to prevent genocide)? Isn’t the US professional military extremely opposed to missions like Somalia and Rwanda? Clinton was hardly the main problem; it is more or less standard American policy to look the other way when genocides are being commited, even by American “allies” like Pakistan and Indonesia during the 70’s.

Anyway it is probably politically unrealistic to expect the US military to intervene every time there is a genocide particularly in geopolitically marginal areas like sub-Saharan Africa. A better option would be for the US to work with the EU, the UN and African democracies to build some kind of African Peace Keeping Force. The US and EU could provide the money,training and equipment while the Africans could supply the peacekeepers.

BTW there is another war going on in Congo which has already killed millions of people many of them civilians. I don’t see the Bush administration doing anything much to stop it.

[ElvisL1ves]

What did Chretien do in Rwanda? Was he getting signals? Was there any real discussion about what Canada should do? Is he being condemned for it even now?

Sam, try showing a little more sense of responsible citizenship. You might even get your posts taken seriously. Or stay a one-trick pony here; it’s your call.

Now, who wants to allocate the blame for the Sudanese civil war, genocide, and slave trade? Anybody? OK, who wants to admit it isn’t really a partisan issue in the US what the US does externally? Or that every problem is the US’s responsibility to fix?

Since the OP asks, the speech gave a very clear understanding of where we are in the world and where we have to go, and that it isn’t where we’re headed right now. I have little to quarrel with it. Amazing what a little thought can lead you to, right, George?

[DSeid]

At the time of the Rwandan catastrophe I had just visited The Holocaust Museum in Washington. I came away wondering if we learned anything from the Holocaust. Hey, “Never Again” makes a nice truism, but here was a massacre of large scale in progress and most of the world was looking the other way.

Never again except if the people involved don’t look like us?

Never again except if our national interests are totally unaffected?

Never again except if …

Clinton wasn’t alone in this sin of ommission. Democrats, Republicans, the UN, me and probably you … no loud voices were raised.

[Sam_Stone]

Clinton didn’t ‘miss signals’ in Rwanda - he missed the increasingly frantic pleas of the U.N. representative in Rwanda who was BEGGING for support. Support that he had been promised, and which was used to convince the Rwandans that they wouldn’t be attacked.

800,000 dead. And it wouldn’t have taken an invasion to protect them, or a gigantic military presence. They were killed by mobs, for God’s sake. Hacked to death with machetes and picks.

It was also Kofi Annan’s worst moment, as he looked the other way when his own representative pleaded for help.

[Stoid]

<sob>

[elucidator]

Well, I hope you’re happy now! You’ve made Stoid cry! Damn heartless Canadians! I hope the Bushistas put through a bill to raise your rent!

There, there, Natasha! Cheer up, it’s gonna be ok. Look, here’s some dorty peectures! Split bologna shots, and everything. Here’s one of a guy who’s hung like a Texan!