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The Washington Times - Politics
Published in Washington, D.C.
5am -- February 24, 1998
www.washtimes.com
Saddam's war legacy and the Constitution
Bill Clinton's legacy may turn out to be that he was the sex
education president, bringing a greater understanding of oral sex
to the puzzled but curious children of America.
Or his legacy may turn out to be that he was the first president
to turn U.S. foreign policy over to a foreign despot and the
secretary-general of the United Nations, indulging the diplomatic
pretensions of Kofi Annan at the expense of the Constitution he
swore to uphold.
But what about Hillary?
What does the first lady who propounds the view that it takes a
village to raise an American child think about her husband's
proposition that destroying a few villages is the way to poke a
stick in Saddam Hussein's eye?
The first lady's view is important because it's pretty clear that
since she made her irrevocable trust to stand by her man, she can
call any shot -- or shell, laser beam or bomb -- that suits her
fancy. She could spike her husband's guns until further notice,
or until he comes up with a coherent strategy for destroying
Saddam Hussein, which is the only strategy that makes sense.
"If we have to use force, it is because we are America,"
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright told an interviewer the
other day. "We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We
see farther into the future."
This approach surely offends Mrs. Clinton, the princess of the
House committee considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon only
a quarter of a century ago, an impeachment that was driven not so
much by concern for his part in a "third-rate burglary" as by
leftist and liberal contempt for a war in Vietnam. In fact, some
of the rhetoric of Mrs. Albright's war speechifying ("we stand
tall") sounds suspiciously like it was rifled from the files --
perhaps archives is a less suggestive word -- of the
Johnson-Nixon years. She may yet promise to " nail that coonskin
to the wall."
We just won't call it war. "We are talking about using military
force," she told the students at Tennessee State, "but we are not
talking about a war. This is an important distinction."
This sounds familiar. Some Americans remember how FDR talked on
the eve of World War II: ("I hate war, Eleanor hates war, even
little Fala hates war. ..."), and even more of us remember how
President Truman, who knew better, rallied support for an earlier
"half-a**ed war" under the wimpy pastel banner of the United
Nations, though Mr. Truman never proposed making the Constitution
hostage to the rabble and scrabble of the rest of a world driven
by envy of the United States, and unlike this generation of
national leaders, he had actually seen a battlefield.
The attempt by Bill Clinton to sell dangerous nonsense is
breathtaking. Mr. Clinton, AWOL from his generation's war,
concedes that the bombs he would drop on Baghdad (and the odd
village) won't destroy Saddam's laboratories of evil, and he
insists that he doesn't want the bombs that kill women and
children to hurt Saddam himself. He only wants to teach Saddam a
lesson, even if he doesn't have a clue about what that lesson
should be.
Bombs sound nifty. They were devastatingly effective in the
famous Christmas bombing of Haiphong in 1969, when, for a few
horrific days, the evil North Vietnamese government thought the
United States was at last serious about winning the Vietnam War.
The Communists were so frightened that they began fattening
American prisoners of war, even reining the torture, expecting
that they would soon have to give up their carefully hoarded
human pawns. Then Washington inexplicably eased the pressure,
eliminating incentive in just the way the Clintonites would
eliminate incentive after four days of bombing Baghdad.
Bombs, which ought to be the last resort, are the first resort of
commanders in chief who learned strategy and tactics at antiwar
rallies abroad. John Deutch, who was the director of the CIA in
the first Clinton administration, argues in the New York Times
that almost nothing is likely to work against Saddam.
Assassination is out, even if it were not against the law, and
besides, the Arabs defer to Saddam, as psychotic as he is, and
world opinion (whatever that is) wouldn't like it. Saddam Hussein
is evil, maybe even a match for Hitler in the Evil-Eye League,
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