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Sunday, September 24, 2006

What Bill Clinton Left Out
Posted by Jill | 3:33 PM
A glaring omission from Bill Clinton's correction of the wingut delusion that he refused to go after Al Qaeda and that his handling of the Somalia episode in 1993 gave Osama Bin Laden the impression that we were weak was the fact that Bill Clinton inherited the Somalia mess from George Herbert Walker Bush, who launched the intervention in Somalia on December 4, 1992 -- just weeks before leaving office:

Deteriorating security prevents the UN mission from delivering food and supplies to the starving Somalis. Relief flights are looted upon landing, food convoys are hijacked and aid workers assaulted. The UN appeals to its members to provide military forces to assist the humanitarian operation.

With only weeks left in his term as president, George Bush responds to the UN request, proposing that US combat troops lead an international UN force to secure the environment for relief operations. On December 5, the UN accepts his offer, and Bush orders 25,000 US troops into Somalia. On December 9th, the first US Marines land on the beach.

Bush assures the American people and troops involved that this is not an open ended commitment; the objective is to quickly provide a secure environment so that food can get through to the starving Somalis, and then the operation will be turned over to the UN peacekeeping forces. He assures the public that he plans for the troops to be home by Clinton's inauguration in January.

This US-led United Task Force (UNITAF) is dubbed "Operation Restore Hope."


Well, as we know now, he was wrong, and the troops were NOT home by the time of Clinton's inauguration in January 1993. Perhaps Clinton's friendship with Bush Sr. as a result of their work on tsunami relief is why he left it out, or perhaps he wanted to live, unlike the current president, by the traditional presidential unwritten code of not trashing your predecessor.

It should also be noted that in his smackdown of snivelling little rat-faced git Chris Wallace, he explained what he did after the Cole bombing in 2000:

I worked hard to try and kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still President, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him....The entire military was against sending Special Forces into Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter and no one thought we could do it otherwise. We could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that al Qaeda was responsible while I was President. [Not] until I left office.


And yet, the incoming Administration, the people who WERE empowered to do something about the Cole bombing, not only did absolutely nothing, but DEFENDED doing absolutely nothing. As John Amato notes:

Rice admits that the Bush administration didn’t want to retaliate for the Cole bombing, despite Clarke’s prodding:

CLARKE: I suggested, beginning in January of 2001, that … there was an open issue which should be decided about whether or not the Bush administration should retaliate for the Cole attack [which occurred in October 2000].

Unfortunately, there was no interest, no acceptance of that proposition. And I was told on a couple of occasions, "Well, you know, that happened on the Clinton administration’s watch." I didn’t think it made any difference. I thought the Bush administration, now that it had the CIA saying it was al Qaeda, should have responded.
…

RICE: I do not believe to this day that it would have been a good thing to respond to the Cole, given the kinds of options that we were going to have. … We really thought that the Cole incident was passed, that you didn’t want to respond tit-for-tat. …Just responding to another attack in an insufficient way we thought would actually probably embolden the terrorists — they had been emboldened by everything else that had been done to them — and that the best course was to look ahead to a more aggressive strategy against them.


This from the Administration which claims everything it's done since 9/11/01 has been exactly that -- responding tit-for-tat, and which has made it very clear that there is no amount of dead Middle Eastern civilians that can be reached to make us "even."

The Cole was in the past. The August 6 PDB was "a historical document." Why on earth would anyone think Condi Rice has one iota of a clue what the hell she's doing?
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