Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
Clinton's containment policy? What containment policy? He adopted means commensurate with the risk? What means did he adopt? He didn't do anything about Saddam. He just continued the status quo. He had no choice. And what knee jerk reaction to Clinton's foreign policy? When did I ever critisize Clinton's foreign policy?
I have no knee jerk reaction. Your knee jerk reaction is: Clinton = good. Bush = bad.
Saddam kicked out the Weapons inspectors and there was nothing Clinton could do about it. Saddam violated the gulf war treaties but there was nothing Clinton could do about it. His only option to get Saddam back in line was to go to war - and he did not have the political capital to do that.
I have never critisized Clinton's foreign policy. I thought what he did against Serbia was brave and there was no political upside for him. If he screwed up he would get skewered and if he succeeded he wouldn't get any credit. And he did it anyway. That was an act of statesmen ship and not of politics. I thought he was right when he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. For both Serbia and Sudan he was skewered by Michael Moore.
When W. got into office, Saddam was totally ignoring the gulf war treaty and "making a mockery of the weaspons inspection system". But there was nothing W. could do about it because he did not have the political capital to start a war. He had to continue the status quo just like Clinton had to continue the status quo.
During Clinton's administration we had total justification to go to war against Saddam but America was just not into it. And if Clinton had tried to go to war against Iraq, he would have been accused of the whole wag the dog thing.
However, after 9-11 the public's willingness to take care of our problems with military means changed, and W. used that opportunity to take out Saddam. I think Clinton and Gore would probably have done the same thing. Except the only difference now would be that if Gore (or Clinton) had gone in and there were no weapons of mass destruction the Republicans in Congress would now be screaming about Gore lying and deceiving us into war.
US foreign policy is mostly dictated by external events. It is just the political climate that makes the acts controversial. The sitting administration mostly makes the logical choice and then the opposition critisizes that because that is what the oposition does in our system. When Clinton ran against Bush I he critisized everything Bush was doing in foreign policy. From China, to Haiti to Somalia he critisized it all. And then when he got into office he kept doing exactly what Bush I was doing. He did not change one foreign policy position of the US government. When Bush II was running he critisized everything that the Clinton administration was doing, from nation building in the balkans to Iraq. But when W. got into office he continued everything the Clinton administration was doing. He did not change a thing. From the balkins to Iraq W. kept the status quo. He had to let Saddam to continue flouting the Weapons Inspectors and the Gulf War I treaty, because there was not much else he could do.
For the past twenty years the US foreign policy has been very consistent, the only people that can't see that are the ones that are so caught up in partisan politics they can't see reality anymore. And you are one of those people.
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I thought the point of your original post was that Clinton was lying. It occurs to me that you may have been quoting Clinton to prove that Bush wasn't lying. If so, I suggest you read something more germane: Ron Suskind's recent book, The One Percent Solution. The Platonic Ideal Spanky would read that book and come back and say, "it is well and good that Presidents mislead the public about the war on terror because that is what Presidents have always done and it is how we fight these wars." You would refer to FDR, and so on. And then we would have a well-intentioned and meaningful conversation about how 9/11 changed everything and whether democracy is a good form of government for fighting wars and the extent to which we are abandoning our constitutional traditions in order to export them to countries like Iraq.
OTOH, if you were criticizing Clinton's foreign policy, I will just point out that no matter how many words you use, it is still true that when he left office Iraq had no WMD and that he found a way to make this happen short of invading and occupying the country.
