Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (55 page)

A rising concern for the administration, though not a new one, was foreign-inspired terrorism, which took the lives of fifty-four Americans between 1993 and the end of 1997. Another thirty-six were killed between 1998 and the end of 2000.
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In February 1993, Muslim terrorists set off a bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six, injuring 1,000, and forcing 5,000 people to evacuate the building. After the CIA concluded that extremists connected to Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate former president Bush in Kuwait in early 1993, Clinton ordered a strike of cruise missiles on Baghdad in June. It destroyed Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters. The president also had to worry about nuclear proliferation. Including the United States, eight nations possessed nuclear weapons in 1993, and others, among them the despotic governments of Iran and North Korea, were clearly anxious to join the club.
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Russia, troubled with domestic instability, still possessed large stockpiles of carelessly stored nuclear weapons.

Moving cautiously in this uncertain post–Cold War world, the president continued the economic sanctions, U.N. weapons inspections, and no-fly zones that had been fastened on Iraq after the Gulf War. He authorized production of B-2 (Stealth) bombers and only marginally reduced defense expenditures, which still helped to employ an estimated two million Americans. In 1997, the United States spent $271 billion on defense, a sum that was only a little lower than the $290 billion expended in 1993. Sums such as these were nearly 100 times the amount appropriated for Goals 2000, Clinton’s education initiative.
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While maintaining these policies, the Clinton administration necessarily had to worry about a host of troubles around the globe. Civil wars and separatist movements in 1993 continued to shed blood in many areas, including the Balkans, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Spain. Though South Africa finally ended apartheid in early 1994, civil wars and AIDS still ravaged many other African countries. Religious confrontations—Muslims against Jews, Sunnis against Shiites, radical Islamists against moderates—threatened mayhem in parts of the Middle East and Central Asia. Many millions of impoverished and oppressed people in the world continued to rage against the economic and military policies of the far richer nations of the West—and especially against those of the United States, whose seductive consumer goods and television programs penetrated virtually every culture in the world. Perplexed, some Americans seemed to be almost nostalgic for the Cold War era, when a simpler bipolar world had confronted them.

How should the United States, the dominant power in the world, respond to these matters? Should America engage in activities, including “nation-building,” aimed at bringing democracy and economic development to other countries? Then and later, a wide range of Americans argued vociferously over these difficult questions. “Realists,” many of whom were conservative in their politics, insisted that the United States should not become seriously involved in foreign conflicts unless the nation’s important security interests were at stake. A number of liberals, remembering the horrors of Vietnam, agreed with them. The prevalence of cautious views such as these indicated that Bush may have been wrong in declaring after the Gulf War that the United States had “kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” Other Americans, however, were prepared to pursue more activist foreign policies. They included conservatives who favored defense buildups that would intimate potential troublemakers, evangelicals who hoped to save souls, and liberals who believed that carefully considered American interventions might advance human rights.

Until October 1993, no single crisis made Clinton devote great attention to international affairs. What then happened in Somalia forced his hand and had long-range repercussions for the foreign policies of the United States. Some 440 elite American troops in that poverty-stricken, politically chaotic country, having been dispatched by Clinton himself in August, were seeking to capture a powerful warlord—one of many in Somalia—who in June had killed and mutilated twenty-four Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers there. In October, rebels using hand-fired, rocket-propelled grenades managed to down two Black Hawk helicopters carrying American soldiers. In fierce fighting that lasted off and on for seventeen hours, Somalis killed eighteen and wounded eighty-four Americans, all of them cut down in the capital city of Mogadishu.
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Americans ultimately “won” this battle, killing hundreds of Somalis, including many civilians, and wounding hundreds more. Meanwhile, however, television viewers in the United States and elsewhere were horrified by footage that showed jubilant Somalis dragging a dead American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu. Many outraged Americans, with agonizing memories of Vietnam revived, demanded to know what the United States was doing in such a God-forsaken place as Somalia, and why Clinton had allowed “mission creep” to endanger American lives. Other critics blasted the administration for apparently having failed to provide sufficient military backup for the troops.

Clinton, furiously denouncing aides for his own inattention to Somalia, sent in reinforcements but also announced that American troops would ultimately be withdrawn. Defense Secretary Aspin, who in late September had declined to supply armored reinforcements, was blamed for the American losses and replaced. When Somali factions signed a precarious peace agreement in March 1994, an obviously relieved president pulled United States combat forces from the country. United Nations peacekeepers, including some Americans, stayed on. But anarchy continued to prevail in Somalia, and the images of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets remained powerful, promoting in the United States what some observers called a new syndrome, that of “Vietmalia.” A vivid film,
Black Hawk Down
(2001), later revived these awful memories.
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Only ten days after the bloodshed in Mogadishu, events in Haiti seemed further to humiliate the world’s most powerful nation. Some 100 armed and angry Haitians, shouting “Somalia, Somalia,” blocked the disembarkation at Port-au-Prince of 200 American non-combat soldiers who had been dispatched in order to train Haitian police as part of a “nation-building” mission there. This effort was expected in time to restore to the presidency the legitimately elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a defrocked radical priest who had been driven into exile by a coup in 1991. The ship carrying the soldiers,
Harlan County
, was forced by the protestors to turn away, thereby leading the president to launch another tirade at his aides. As he recognized, the event bared an obvious fact: He had no backup plan to cope with the resistance.

The debacles, as many Americans saw them, of Mogadishu and Port-au-Prince clearly unnerved Clinton and his advisers, who hoped to promote order and democracy abroad but who also greatly feared endangering the lives of American soldiers. The near-mesmerizing power of memories of Mogadishu became especially clear during one of the greatest horrors of modern times: genocide ravaging Rwanda that broke out in April 1994 and lasted for 100 days. When the vicious, often hand-to-hand fighting and butchering involving Hutu and Tutsi people finally subsided, at least 800,000 people lay dead, most of them Tutsis and moderate Hutus slashed to death by extremist Hutus brandishing machetes. The Tutsis, a minority in Rwanda, lost an estimated 70 percent of their people. (Later, establishing a despotic government in the country, they exacted revenge by killing untold thousands of Hutus both in Rwanda and in neighboring Congo.)
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What the U.N. or the United States should have done in order to avert or significantly limit this slaughter was unclear in 1994. What America did do after ten U.N. peacekeepers were butchered in April was to take the lead in discouraging Western intervention and to call for the departure from Rwanda of the peacekeepers, thereby giving the killers carte blanche. The United States, like other Western nations, had no important economic or strategic interests in Rwanda, and it showed little desire to protect black people in the region. With most of the U.N. peacekeepers gone from Rwanda, America stood aside while the carnage mounted.

During Clinton’s first two years in office, he seemed to have no good answers about how to calm intensifying savagery that was devastating fratricidal contenders—Croats, Serbs, and Muslims—in Croatia and Bosnia. Between April 1992 and October 1995, more than 200,000 people were killed in these regions, most of them Muslims slaughtered by Bosnian Serbs who had initially been egged on by the nationalistic leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic.
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The majority of the dead were civilians who were murdered in surgical-style “ethnic cleansing” operations that also raped thousands of women and drove masses of people from their homes. During the 1992 campaign, Clinton had criticized Bush for standing aside while such carnage was taking place, but he, too, refrained from bold steps that might lead to the death of American soldiers. Maintaining the arms embargo that continued to hurt the underequipped Muslims, neither the United States nor NATO intervened. Some 6,000 overmatched U.N. peacekeepers, stationed in Bosnia since November 1992, were virtual hostages to the bloodthirsty contenders on the ground.
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In late 1994, Clinton slightly toughened America’s stance concerning trouble spots in the world. In September, having threatened an armed invasion of Haiti, he managed to restore Aristide to power and to send in forces to help train a local police constabulary. In October he concluded an “agreed framework” with North Korea, whose leaders promised to freeze the nation’s nuclear program and open its borders to international inspection. In return, the United States committed to supply North Korea, where millions of people were thought to be starving, with food, medical supplies, and heavy fuel oil. But Americans still showed little stomach for long-range nation-building in Haiti, from which Clinton withdrew American forces within two years. Aristide then conscripted the police as his personal army. Violence and political corruption soon returned to plague the people of that strife-ridden country.
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Events in North Korea were equally discouraging. Critics of Clinton asserted that the secretive North Korean government, having bamboozled the United States, would renege on its agreement.
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Given these frustrations, it was no wonder that Clinton lamented the intrusion of foreign policy on his plans for domestic reform. In part, he had himself to blame, for he spent relatively little time in 1993–94 on international matters. Aspin, moreover, had proved to be inept at developing defense policies. The president was especially disengaged from intelligence matters, virtually ignoring his CIA chief, James Woolsey. When a deranged pilot crashed a plane into the White House in 1993, the joke went around that the aviator was Woolsey, trying desperately to engage Clinton’s attention.
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It is evident in retrospect that no Western leaders at that time had sure solutions for coping with the unfamiliar international scene that had so quickly replaced the bipolar world of the Cold War years. There were no obvious answers—only hard choices. Should Clinton have sent American forces to Somalia in 1993, or kept them there after the battle of Mogadishu? Should he have intervened more quickly or forcefully in Haiti? Could he have found a way to deter the remote and apparently fanatical leaders of North Korea? Mobilized the West in time to stop genocide in Rwanda? Sent American troops to stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans? In considering these problems, Clinton was acutely aware of polls in 1993–94 revealing that the American people were skittish about undertaking moves such as these.

Still, few Americans in late 1994 gave Clinton high marks for foreign policy. In dealing with the international scene, as in handling health care reform, he was still feeling his way.

C
LINTON WAS EVER AWARE
of political considerations and rarely stopped thinking in 1993–94 about the upcoming off-year elections, or about his own campaign for reelection in 1996. Especially concerned about the power of conservative voters, he sought during mid- and late 1994 to distance himself from liberals in the Democratic Party. Thus he backed a welfare bill that would have cut the length of time during which people might stay on the welfare rolls. As Clinton anticipated, the bill, which he introduced late in the congressional session, did not pass, but he had let conservative voters know that he still had welfare reform in mind. He was more successful with Congress in September 1994, when he secured passage of a $30 billion crime bill. Stealing the thunder of conservatives, the law provided money for 100,000 new policemen in communities around the nation and for construction of prisons. It also included a “three strikes and you’re out” penalty for federal crimes.
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Unimpressed by Clinton’s moves to the center, partisan foes of the president hammered at his liberal initiatives of 1993–94: health care reform, admitting gays to the military, gun control. They seized especially on media accounts that appeared to implicate the Clintons in financial and political improprieties surrounding earlier land development deals along the Whitewater River in Arkansas. Bowing to political pressure, Clinton agreed in 1993 to the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate these and other financial and legal activities of his wife and himself. Attorney General Janet Reno, overseeing the issue at a time when the statute of 1978 setting up the mechanisms for appointment of such counsels had temporarily been allowed to lapse, then selected Robert Fiske, a former federal prosecutor (and a Republican), to conduct the investigations.