by Conrad Black
Clinton also claimed a role in Irish affairs, which were still disturbed by agitation for secession from the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland, and allegations of mistreatment of the Roman Catholic minority there by the Protestants. The Irish Republican Army and various Protestant groups frequently resorted to violence. About 40 percent of Ulster (Northern Ireland) was strongly attached to the British Union, but prepared to entertain some compromises; 20 percent were unionists opposed to any compromise; 20 percent were somewhat secessionist, but ostensibly opposed to violence; and 20 percent were secessionist with no great aversion, or even an active disposition, to violence. Religion was really a pretext, though the secessionists were almost entirely Roman Catholic. It was a strange political culture that defined itself, as the militant Protestants did, by the right to stage provocative marches through Roman Catholic areas celebrating the anniversary of the most violent episodes of Protestant oppression of Roman Catholics in British, and especially Irish, history.
Clinton was certainly a partisan of peace, but oversimplified the problems, welcomed IRA leaders to the White House on St. Patrick’s Day to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and other Irish American ditties, and allowed his ambassador to Dublin, Jean Smith (President Kennedy’s sister), to pretend she had some standing in Northern Ireland, though it was a province of the United Kingdom, America’s foremost ally. Clinton may have made some contribution to the de-escalating but not definitive Good Friday Agreement of 1998 between the factions, and conditions did improve markedly, especially after the immense international revulsion against terrorism that came in the next few years. But President Clinton did go to the outer limits of what was appropriate in the affairs of two friendly sovereign countries (the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland).
This rising phenomenon of terrorism was, in the absence of rival states, the emerging challenge to the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt had outlined the basis of future U.S. strategic policy in two sentences in addresses to the Congress at the beginning and end of 1941. In the State of the Union message of January 6, he said, “We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and tinkling cymbal would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement.” And in his war message on December 8, he said, “We will make very certain that this form of treachery never again endangers us.” The United States would not be an appeasement power and would thereafter maintain sufficient deterrent strength to dissuade any foreign power from direct attack (Chapters 9 and 10). These policies were followed by his successors; the United States has not, in the 1930s sense of the word, appeased offensive and antagonistic states, and no nation has dared to attack it directly since Pearl Harbor. With terrorism, enemies of the West and America in particular, but of governments generally, thought they had a way round this: the terrorist act launched by forces apparently unrelated to any particular country.
This got underway in earnest in Clinton’s time, and especially as it proved possible to recruit people happy to kill themselves in the act. The opening gun in the United States was the truck-bombing in the basement garage of the World Trade Center in New York on February 26, 1993. It was apparently masterminded by an extremist Islamist sheikh living in New Jersey, who, with others, was successfully prosecuted. Seven people were killed and 1,042 were injured, but the plan, to weaken the foundations of the North Tower sufficiently to topple it into the other tower, bringing them both down, did not succeed.
The Clinton administration mobilized a coordinated antiterrorism effort, and doubtless prevented some tragedies, but its retaliatory actions were ineffectual. An international military barracks, the Khobar Towers, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was attacked with an explosive-laden tanker truck parked nearby, killing 20 (19 Americans), and injuring 372, on June 25, 1996. The U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were almost simultaneously attacked by suicide truck-bombers in August 1998, on the model of the attack at the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. In Nairobi, 212 people were killed and about 4,000 injured, and in Dar es Salaam, 11 people were killed and 85 injured. The great majority of the victims were local people, as only 12 Americans were killed, though the embassies were very heavily damaged. And on October 26, 1998, the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole was rammed by a small craft laden with high explosives in the harbor of Aden (Yemen), a suicide attack that killed 17 people and seriously damaged the ship. None of these attacks inflicted anything like the casualties that had been hoped, but when Clinton left office, it was an escalating pattern and a very sinister threat, though not directed exclusively at the United States, and of a lesser gravity than the armed hostility of a serious country. Clinton’s response could have been much more effective.
The 2000 presidential election pitted the former president’s son, Texas governor George W. Bush, who had won a spirited contest over Senator John McCain for the nomination, against incumbent vice president Al Gore, who had won the nomination over a strong challenge from New Jersey senator and former basketball star William Bradley. Bush took as his vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney, former prominent Republican congressman from Wyoming, White House chief of staff, and Father Bush’s defense secretary, and Gore selected Connecticut senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the first major party Jewish nominee for national office (which did not appear to affect the vote at all). Bush appeared to lead narrowly through the campaign, but the poll result was 50.46 million for Bush and only 113 votes short of 51 million votes for Gore; 47.9 percent to 48.4 percent.
Florida was apparently won by Bush by 537 votes, about one 1/100th of 1 percent of the roughly five million votes cast in the state. The absentee military vote eventually raised Bush’s margin to 900. Gore demanded a hand recount in four counties, and a ludicrous farce began of individual returning officers sharply disputing the acceptability of whether entire portions of ballots that were detachable, called “chads,” had been fully removed. Family friend James A. Baker, former secretary of state and of the Treasury, who had managed George H. W. Bush into the vice presidential nomination, and then both of Ronald Reagan’s campaigns and both of the elder Bush’s, came to the rescue with a legal campaign.
The Florida Supreme Court ordered a hand recount of the entire state, which was impossible, not only for practical reasons but because scores or even hundreds of thousands of individual ballots could be contested judicially. This was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, 7-2. More controversially, in a 5-4 vote, the high court declared a “safe harbor date” of December 12 to accommodate constitutional requirements for the assembly of the Electoral College results for a January 20 inauguration, which effectively gave George W. Bush the election.
It was a questionable result, as the dates could be adjusted for technological realities, but any recount of ballots cast in the relatively primitive manner of some Florida counties would be a Gordian knot that would have to be sliced at some point. Because of the impossibility of judging the validity of so many individual ballots, it will never be known who won the 2000 election, which is probably even more problematic than the Kennedy-Nixon (and Johnson) election of 1960. This was the fourth time (after John Quincy Adams and Jackson in 1824, Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland in 1888, Chapters 4 and 7) that a presidential candidate won with fewer votes than his chief opponent (though the same almost certainly occurred in 1960 as well, because of the misallocation of Alabama votes for a Democratic third-party candidate to Kennedy as official Democrat).
It would be unfair to impute the votes of the Supreme Court justices to the party of the presidents who chose them, but all five of the majority were Republican selections, though so also were two of the dissenters. It may not be unreasonable to suspect that if seven of the nine justices had been put forward by Democratic rather than Republican presidents, the key 5–4 vote could have been different. (If the justices put forward by the Republican candidate’s father had recused, the vote would still have been 4-3.) Somebody has to win, and Bush was as likely to have
won Florida as Gore. But to be absolutely sure, the whole state would have had to be repolled rather than recounted, which was impossible in the deadlines and would have been an unfair elevation of the prerogatives of the voters of Florida compared with other states. The system is imperfect, but it worked, and Gore, a somewhat wooden personality, responded graciously. (He went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize and make a substantial fortune as an alarmist environmental advocate.)
Clinton had been impeached in 1998, but condemned by comfortably fewer than the two-thirds of the Senate required for removal from office, over his sworn statements about a sexual relationship he had had with a young female White House intern. He had been sued civilly by other claimants of sexual harassment or misconduct, but these concerns, though tawdry and embarrassing to him and his great office, were not the sort of behavior the authors of the Constitution (some of whom were not paragons of connubial fidelity either) had had in mind for justifying the removal from office of federal officials. What should have occurred but didn’t was a rejection of the practice of criminalizing partisan and policy differences between the president and the Congress, and a retroactive acknowledgement that neither the impeachment of Andrew Johnson nor the House Judiciary Committee vote to impeach Richard Nixon should have happened.
William Jefferson Clinton left office a popular and certainly not an unsuccessful president, but not an especially consequential president either. He probably accomplished less than any preceding president who served two full terms, except possibly Grant, and that is not certain, and of course Grant’s status as a great figure of American history is based on his military career, which was at least as brilliant and about as important as those of Washington and Eisenhower. Clinton was highly intelligent, assiduous in policy terms, moderate, and popular in America and the world. He was well-served by the strategic triumphs of his predecessors and the economic head of steam stoked up by Ronald Reagan. If George H. W. Bush had been more politically agile and astute, he would have avoided the farce of Ross Perot’s intrusion and would have reaped the full benefit of his strong leadership in the Gulf War and of Reagan’s great accomplishments. But Clinton took the economic bonus and cannot be blamed for the good fortune of serving in less difficult times. He was, other than in his personal conduct, which is irrelevant for these purposes, a prudent leader who made few short-term mistakes. But he faced few strategic decisions and had little aptitude to think in those terms, did not reply adequately to the incipient terrorist threat, and began the economic erosion caused by the imbalance of payments and the overbuilding of housing whose financing was even flimsier than its construction standards. These chickens would feast on steroids and come home to roost with a terrible vengeance after Clinton had gone but before his wife could reclaim the White House as a Clinton family home.
3. GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE WAR ON TERROR
George W. Bush entered office with the usual goodwill of an incoming president and his party’s narrow control of both houses of the Congress. His secretary of state was the very widely respected General Colin L. Powell, the first African American (in fact, Caribbean American) to hold that or any comparably high federal office. He was a former national security advisor and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, like Eisenhower and Marshall, could have had the nomination of either party and almost certainly the presidency, had he wished them.
The Bush presidency got underway quietly enough, but the world was changed utterly by the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Four groups of suicide terrorists seized control of airliners departing eastern airports for the West Coast, to ensure they were heavily laden with jet fuel, and then took the controls and directed them into their targets, killing themselves, everyone on board, and nearly 3,000 others, none of any significance to the militant Islamist cause they were promoting; hundreds were not even Americans. No one who watched television then or in the succeeding days can ever forget the news film of the two airliners, about 20 minutes apart, slamming into the tops of the two towers of the previously targeted World Trade Center. Even those assaults, though the airplanes throttled out and generated tremendous explosions, did not bring down the towers. But the structural spines of the buildings, though of great tensile strength, had not been designed to endure this intensity of heat indefinitely, over so many floors, and the world watched, horrified, on live television, as first one tower and, on the time lapse between the initial attacks, the other melted from the top 15 floors, the descending weight of the molten structure causing a concertina effect as each building began, almost majestically and with gathering speed, to descend to the ground.
The New York firemen performed prodigies of courage, and most occupants of the buildings were able to descend the staircases and escape, but very few who were in offices above the places of impact of the aircraft could be saved. Apart from pictures of the detonation of the atomic bomb and of the Nazi death camps, the filmed and pictorial history of human combat yields few spectacles so horrifying as those of the demise of the World Trade Center towers. In all of American history, only the film of the assassination of President Kennedy rivals these in impact. The third aircraft flew into the Pentagon, but not where the defense secretary’s and Joint Chiefs’ offices are, and the building was repaired quite quickly. A fourth aircraft was hijacked and was thought to be aimed at the U.S. Capitol or the White House, but passengers using their cell phones learned of the other suicide attacks and a group of male passengers tried to overpower the hijackers. In the ensuing struggle, the aircraft crashed in rural Pennsylvania, but at least no one was killed on the ground.
Palestinians cheered, though Arafat warned against it and purported to give blood in aid of the injured. Iranian and Iraqi official reaction was favorable and admiring. But almost all the world that was not inflamed in militant Islamic lunacy was appalled at this dark new chapter in human conflict—the mass, world spectacle of the suicidal massacre of the innocents. For the first time in its history of 52 years, Clause 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty was invoked and the NATO membership unanimously declared that all member countries had been attacked as a result of the September 11 (9/11) onslaught on America. The often tartly anti-American French highbrow daily, Le Monde, famously headlined: “Today, We Are All Americans.”
President Bush, who had been in an elementary school in Florida promoting his education reforms when advised of what was at first assumed to be an accident, quickly flew to an air base in Louisiana, and then to the emergency command headquarters in Nebraska, where there were, in early hindsight, somewhat unseemly pictures of portly aides running with nuclear code boxes to the accesses to the underground nuclear-attack-proof control center. After a few hours underground, it was clear this was not a coordinated international threat, and Bush returned to Washington on his official aircraft, escorted by advanced U.S. Air Force fighters for the first time ever in domestic airspace. Bush spoke briefly to the nation late in the evening, and while it was not a particularly memorable address, he enunciated the principles that the United States would divide foreign countries between those who were its allies and those who were not, and that countries that assisted terrorism would be treated no differently than terrorists themselves. The world was not accustomed to seeing the United States as a victim country, and its president made it clear that it would not be a passive victim for long.
There was an almost unanimous U.S. consensus for severe countermeasures and, as always, the removal of the threat. Bush spoke well at a national memorial service for the victims at the National Cathedral and also in addressing the Congress and the nation. He warned strenuously against any reaction against Muslims in general, and ensured that a Muslim cleric was among the eminent clergy who spoke at the memorial service. Bush and his chief collaborators, including Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, while grateful for NATO’s solidarity, suspected some of the membership of rushing to America’s side with a view to moderating its response by collegializing it. There was perhap
s some truth to this, but such an open and strong endorsement from such a powerful group of countries should have been valued more highly as the great strategic asset and sincere act of solidarity that it was.
The organization responsible for most of the previous recent terrorist attacks, in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, and on the USS Cole, al-Qaeda, was soon happily taking responsibility for these attacks. The headquarters of the organization was known to be near the eastern frontier of Afghanistan, now a failed state still in civil war, after the shambles of the Soviet occupation and the arming of the fundamentalist Islamic groups (chiefly by the United States). The leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was in the habit of issuing belligerent videos, in which he complained of the Western presence in Saudi Arabia, and raged against the existence of the State of Israel. In the frustration of the Muslim Arabs, alleviated almost exclusively in some of the fortuitously oil-rich countries, militant Islam, a savage and deranged interpretation of that religion, had gathered some strength.
The wealthiest of the Muslim states, Saudi Arabia, was effectively a joint venture between the House of Saud and the Wahhabi sect of extreme Islam; and the informal arrangement was that if the Saudi royal family would finance the Wahhabis’ massive proselytization across the Muslim world with traditional schools and cultural institutions, the House of Saud would be undisturbed in its incumbency. This was a precarious arrangement, and even if it didn’t collapse in disagreement between the parties, as blackmail arrangements almost always do, it was going to lead to trouble with the West quite soon. It had.
The United States, accompanied by the British and soon other NATO forces, landed special forces in Afghanistan in early October, and the Taliban regime, which was already in difficulties with various aggrieved domestic groups, quickly collapsed and fled into the wild Northwest Frontier region of Pakistan, which the government of that country did not control. Clinton had attempted to impose sanctions on both India and Pakistan when those countries became nuclear powers, which did not deter them from achieving and building on that status, but did completely poison their relations with the United States. It left the United States with no serious ally in South Asia, as it had no major ally in the Persian Gulf (Iran and Iraq were almost equally antagonistic).