Clinton West
Reid, Stuart
London The Tomahawk raid on Baghdad came as a profound relief to John Major. For the first time in months he was able to do what British prime ministers like to do best: give unqualified support to...
...What exercised Alexander was not the essential fraudulence of the summit—pace Mickey Kantor, the accord was far from being the greatest ever achieved in history—but the news that Major was trying to re-establish the special relationship between the U.S...
...Clinton," said Cockburn, "will never be anything morethan a gofer for Money Power...
...There was something not quite right about a draft-dodger becoming a kick-ass, something less than honorable about a man who balked at resisting Communist tyranny in Southeast Asia shrugging his shoulders (albeit sadly) over collateral damage in the Middle East...
...Meanwhile, dark thoughts abound...
...There may be one or two policy wonks in the Labour Party who still see Clinton as the man who can show them the way to victory, but they are keeping their heads down...
...Article 51," Major said, "I think it was entirely right of the United States to act in self-defense and they have my total support in doing so...
...It's not just a cultural thing, though...
...Traditional conservatives, who don't care how much the American president taxes and spends, see him as a brash opportunist, a blow-dried blowhard with an unhealthy love of jogging...
...Clinton and his entourage did come over as jumped-up know-nothings...
...Simon Jenkins, writing in the Times, fantasizes (if that's the word) about a human rights–inspired American invasion of Ireland in 1995...
...Back in January, some of us tried W to put a flattering spin on the inauguration, ,but our hearts were not in it...
...Now that the Russian bear no longer sits in the woods east of the Elbe, who needs Uncle Sam...
...In other parts of Europe, however, where the tradition of following the American leader is less firmly established, the reaction was more measured...
...Right-wing anti-Americanism has come a long way since the end of the Cold War, but it has gained enormously in strength and power since Clinton arrived in the White House...
...and Britain—indeed, between the U.S...
...Maya Angelou's "Sioux . . . Jew" was a rhyme against humanity...
...Such sentiments would have been almost unthinkable in a conservative newspaper in the Bush years, and in the Thatcher-Reagan years would surely have resulted in the writer and editor being arraigned before the Bar of the House of Commons...
...Clinton's singular achievement is to have united left and right against America...
...In Tribune, the weekly newspaper of the Labour left, Ian Williams arrived at much the same conclusion...
...Britain and America were one again...
...After nine months of the Clinton presidency, relations between the U.S...
...So will the journalism of Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens (indeed, Hitchens, who has many admirers on the thoughtful right, will have influenced conservative opinion as well...
...utual understanding may not break out, at the M earliest, until January 20, 1997...
...as an overindulged dinosaur whose leaders are given to bonding sessions, confessions of past anxieties, and other sorts of modish introspection and self-centeredness...
...line...
...Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty...
...Elsewhere Clinton is regarded with embarrassed disbelief, and sometimes with furious resentment...
...and the U.K.: The special relationship has been a snare and a delusion...
...Clinton sees sense...
...In fact, some of the more robust conservatives in London would probably go along with his analysis...
...That's not the way it turned out, of course, but the words were fine, and fine words are perhaps the best we can reasonably expect from our leaders...
...Under U.N...
...To the hard left, Clinton is just another American president (i.e., a fascist monster...
...The relationship has been special only in the sense that it has been undignified...
...However, Williams did have a good word to say for Clinton...
...the Marine commander complains that she has been given no plan other than to establish a bridgehead...
...and Europe—are worse than at any time since the Suez crisis of 1956...
...His bungled attempt to place faggots in foxholes—Christopher Hitchens's phrase—is the source of much anger, not least among homosexual liberals, who believe that Clinton has held them up to ridicule, obloquy, and contempt...
...The Marines land under television lights...
...The USS Hillary, with 2,000 Marines, is diverted from the Baltic to the Irish Sea...
...Clinton inherited the mess in Mogadishu too, but he is only making it worse, at least in European eyes, by using Cobras and AC-130s against General Aidid, and missing...
...In June, Cockburn announced in the New Statesman that "the Clinton administration is over...
...The ambush takes place, as ill luck would have it, in front of a team of American fact-finders accompanied by a television crew and at a time when Anglo-American relations have broken down as a result of the war in Bosnia...
...John Major may be keen to restore the special relationship...
...But the best the French government could do was to express its "understanding...
...For the first time in months he was able to do what British prime ministers like to do best: give unqualified support to the American president...
...Thatcherite conservatives see him as a tax-and-spend liberal (although they tend to believe that the American economy will nonetheless recover and carry Britain on its coattails...
...It would be sad if this was the one endeavor in which he actually succeeded...
...The Republican administration officially to be inaugurated in 1997 has already begun...
...Simon Jenkins, a former editor of the Times who is married to Gayle Hunnicutt, the Texan cinemactress, is not an ill-wisher...
...In 1961, however, he thrilled us all...
...America withdraws, talking of "a battle won for democracy and freedom...
...To be fair, Clinton is not entirely to blame for the rupture in the Atlantic alliance...
...Even before the election, Edward Pearce, the Guardian and New Statesman columnist, was writing Clinton off as a "cold-eyed chancer, a cynical careerist accommodating to personal advancement all principle and every notion of right and wrong...
...Understanding, of course, is something you extend, under duress, to juvenile delinquents...
...Pearce's contempt has grown keener since January, and will have done much to inform liberal opinion in Britain...
...True, Boris Yeltsin (who needs the money) and Helmut Kohl (who is after a seat on the Security Council) joined Major in rushing to the colors...
...we were enchanted...
...hat a calamity...
...William Safire and Anthony Lewis chide Clinton for "standing by while the innocent die...
...the Great Republic was reduced to the level of a Hollywood gala...
...Peter Jennings asks: "How many more bodybags must come home before Mr...
...n short, Slick Willie / does not inspire much confidence on this side of the Atlantic, far less respect or affection...
...America and Europe have been drifting apart since the collapse of Communism...
...The conservative press now tends to be far more critical of America than the left-wing press (which itself is far from generous...
...it was as though there had never been any of that tight-lipped unpleasantness over trade and Bosnia and the Tories' ill-judged support for Bush during the election campaign...
...No doubt he created more problems than he solved...
...merely a concerned observer who fears that the sort of Wilsonian interventionism that Clinton favors (when the opinion polls seem to demand it) is likely to create more problems than it solves...
...It is hard to see how a purposeful Atlantic alliance can survive his presidency...
...Let's stop thinking' about tomorrow...
...It truly seemed, as we listened on our wirelesses, that the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace . . . Thirty-two years ago Kennedy succeeded in uniting left and right in Britain in support for, and in many cases love of, the United States...
...To the broad (or liberal) left he is a deep, almost terminal, disappointment...
...The ensuing war is limited, messy, and confused...
...John F. Kennedy was another Wilsonian interventionist...
...Sending tanks against wackos in Texas merely confirmed a growing belief that America under Clinton is a lunatic asylum in which the staff are crazier than the inmates...
...Even those of us who have spent a lifetime supporting American military action were uneasy...
...Why...
...Still, if Clinton cannot be blamed for the world order he inherited, he must accept much of the blame for Clinton's America, and for the European perception of the U.S...
...Because Bill had hired David Gergen and sold out to the Democratic Leadership Council and Wall Street...
...The French response was probably more representative than Major's of European (including British) feeling...
...Writing in March, he concluded that "if it is a choice [for Clinton] between liberalism and a monied interest lobby, then the lobby will force a U-turn every time...
...In July, the right returned to the attack with an outburst from Andrew Alexander in the Daily Mail following the G-7 meeting in Tokyo...
...This is how he sees it: A British patrol mistakenly ambushes a school party in Ulster...
...Thirty-two years ago, we in Britain were taken in...
...He allowed that the president had at least abandoned abortion restrictions and tried to ameliorate the position of gays in the military...
...Any step the Americans took was sure to be followed by the announcement that Britain supported it fully—fulsomely in fact...
...It causes outrage in the U.S., especially in New York and Boston...
...The tribal war in former Yugoslavia, which is creating deep divisions in NATO, is not of Clinton's making, though his vacillation in the face of it has, at one time or another, outraged hawks and doves, Bosnians and Serbs, Englishmen and Germans, wise men and fools...
...Over the decades since the war it has amounted to little more than an understanding that Britain will slavishly follow the U.S...
...That Cockburn, eh...
...The American public turns sour...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
