Spectator's Journal/ The Big Botch

...inclined to blame their misfortunes on us...

...But you wouldn't have in us, and our enemies have no respect for known it from our vice president, who us or fear of us—as proved by the Serbs' went to Moscow to denounce the latest willingness to continue their advance on loudmouth—Zhirinovsky—thereby Gorazde, after our (leased-to-NATOmaking him even more attractive to under-U.N.-control) fighter planes Russian voters, who are increasingly dropped three bombs on Serbian tanks...

...First, he proclaimed the National Security Council exempt from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, thereby keeping White House foreign policy documents out of the hands of the press and other interested citizens...

...at people had voted enthusiastically against most we will bomb for a few minutes (our him, Clinton—guided by super-groupie own soldiers—and other U.N...

...The become obvious that Big Boris isn't up result is that our allies have no confidence to the challenge...

...Any semblance of a coherent foreign policy has disappeared, and the world's lone superpower acts as if decisions are being made by pulling the petals off a daisy...

...Japanese zeroes bombed us into the Second...

...And so, today, we see the return of the old villains in Central and Eastern Europe, in Russia itself, and even in Africa...

...shocked to learn that the rest of the world tended to take his utterances seriously...

...Without vision, the people perish...

...The boiling blood of Paine and Jefferson is as much a part of our national body and soul as the isolationist injunctions of Washington...

...whether they become Waterloos or Austerlitzes will depend upon Clinton's ability to recognize the crises before they rage out of control...

...Bill Clinton, the first modern president to go for days on end without even receiving a national security briefing, is annoyed by suggestions that he doesn't know what he's doing, and even barked at CNN's woman-on-the-Bosnian-scene during a worldwide press conference...

...There were too many votes against his confirmation in the Senate to make him a plausible candidate for the top job, and the subsequent criticism of his Bosnia/Russia policy was so intense that a small group—headed by Gore—is now doing an agonizing reappraisal...

...That is not supposed to hapmitted some of our weaponry to go to pen ever...

...We often hear the various depart- what is (and isn't) ,going on...

...inspectors to see all the nuclear sites in the country: Kim provided a list of places he was prepared to show . . . and we went for it...

...Clinton has exacerbated matters, both because he and his top advisers seemingly misunderstand how the world works, and because of his very bizarre, and quite likely very dangerous, personality...

...t may be true, as the cynics have long said, that every nation gets the leaders it deserves, but if so, we must have sinned most egregiously...

...Bush and his bloodless friends were so embarrassed to find themselves kings of the hill, that they virtually implored the United Nations to take the burden off their weary shoulders...

...Zaire's Mobutu, for example, left for dead on the political battlefield a few years ago, remains the strongest force in his country...

...The second impulse is the presidentas-brinksman...

...When Bush signed it, there were only a few little ripples of discontent, and it should have been an easy matter for Clinton to guide it painlessly through Congress...

...F rom the first minutes of his presidency, Clinton demonstrated a profound ignorance of the world...

...Look at the tongue-lashing the Chinese gave poor Christopher...

...She loves me, she loves me not . . . Michael Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...They have Libyans, or Syrians, or Hutus or Zulus, or Serbs or Mongols...

...This project—now known as the Big Brother Chip in the cyberworld—would bar all other encryption methods (the really secure ones...

...So he's quite comfortable running our Balkan policy through NATO and the U.N., and if the Europeans can't quite get themselves organized and decide upon a common policy, or if the U.N.'s man-on-the-scene isn't comfortable with more bombing, well, we just won't do anything for a while...

...If this president is delighted to deny us the ability to keep our conversations and faxes private, why should he worry about the return of the nomenklatura in Budapest...

...unduly attentive to the Chinese, Clinton Moreover, on those occasions when tough has far outdone him...

...This is the sort of personality that can conjure a crisis out of a sunny day just to get a little thrill, just exactly what Clinton did with the NAFTA Treaty...

...To be sure, there's nothing new in an American administration disengaged from foreign policy...

...As a result, we do not know all of our militarily useful technology to who speaks for the administration, and go to the world's thugs...

...We do not wish to be a part of that world...

...One day we welcome refugees from Haiti, the next we send them back...

...It also means that there are likely to be some very scary moments ahead, because Clinton likes it that way...

...And look at the reaction of North Korean dictator Kim II Sung to Clinton's demand that North Korea permit U.N...

...Yet even as we separate ourselves from the others, we preach to them our own revolutionary values...

...Others' dreams are drenched with fears of rape, massacre, torture, and death...

...After the victory we disarm, hoping (perhaps even believing) that this time the others will leave us alone...

...65 for students $125 for adults before June 24 TO REGISTER OR FOR MORE INFORMATION, CALL ACCURACY IN ACADEMIA AT 1-800-787-0429...

...If Bush blindly talk comes from the administration, there supported Gorby, even when the Russian is no sustained action to back it up...

...No one is Join Reed Irvine, Bill Kristol, Phyllis Schlafly, David Thibodaux, John Howard, Anthony Caso and more at Q Elkin° back the Tctnplc Accuracy in Academia's 8th Annual National Summer Conference July 8 & 9, _1994 The Hotel Washington Washington, D.C...

...As the many Arkansas troopers have told us, the thrill of adultery seems to have been enhanced by taking the maximum chance of being discovered...

...Meanwhile, unless events force Clinton to act, we're not going to have an effective Russia or Bosnia policy, and it's likely that Haiti will provide a tragicomic testing ground of this administration's ability to manage a crisis that is more a domestic issue than a challenge to our national security...

...He obviously thinks that the Swedish and/or German welfare states are better models...

...But how can Clinton convince Serbs and Koreans to heed his warnings, when he's thwarted by a handful of Haitian thugs on a dock...

...We do not know its geography, we do not speak its languages, we do not study its history or its cultures...

...But neither Bush nor Clinton was inclined to proclaim the superiority of our methods...

...Had President Reagan done any such thing, we would have heard frantic jeremiads from the media, but surprisingly little has been heard from them on this censorial decision...

...Our First Father told us to avoid foreign entanglements, and we cherish his words...

...This set the pattern for the Clinton presidency, in which policies are announced, only to be drastically changed within hours or days...

...But if youadd these two ingredients to the Big Government Elitist, it means that countries we're trying to influence will get bolder and bolder...

...Woe to those who tear us from our domestic pursuits, and drag us into the gutter of filth and corruption outside our gates...

...Stalin's voracious appetite roused us from our postwar slumbers in the late forties...

...If ever there were a done deal, it was NAFTA...

...It's a tragic shame, because we were so well placed to reshape the world in our own image, and bequeath a more peaceful and more democratic world to our children...

...f there is a theme in this administraIt's hard to get to the root cause of the tion's foreign policy it is incompeforeign policy mess, because it's almost tence, and we should not underestiimpossible to figure out how the process mate the degree to which it "explains" works...

...Distrust of the world beyond our shores is part of Americans' genetic code...

...Other peoples might well wish to share our disdain for the "others," but they cannot, for danger lies just across their borders...

...One day we announce that Somali "warlord" Aidid is in our crosshairs, and a few weeks later we fly him to peace negotiations...

...This, too, is part of our genetic makeup, for even if our leaders remain silent, the radical facts of our existence shake the foundations of the undemocratic and the repressive...

...German U-boats torpedoed us into the • First World War...

...This approach is of a piece with his domestic policy, which also consists of the big guys (himself, herself, and their friends) telling the little guys (the rest of us) what's good for us...

...in this administration it happens Saddam, Clinton has permitted virtually regularly...

...One day Warren Christopher delivers a stern warning to the Communist Chinese, but within hours the administration decontrols most of our advanced military technology for sale to China...

...Menacing threats alternate with plaintive supplications...

...But while there may not be actual strategies, there are instincts at work, and the horrible events at Gorazde suggest one of the basic drives: Clinton believes that the big guys ought to get together and figure out what needs to be done...

...We are an ideological nation, and our most successful leaders are ideologues...

...Instead, he virtually ignored it—I am told that, for the thirty days prior to the vote, Clinton had originally budgeted just a couple of days for NAFTA, and the balance for health care, which wouldn't come up for a vote for at least half a year...

...In Iran, we should prevent the mullahs from laying their murderous hands on advanced weapons of mass destruction...

...we have Mexicans and Canadians—neighbors, not threatening presences...

...peacekeepStrobe Talbott—has advanced "Don't ers—were attacked far more violently by annoy Yeltsin" as the first principle of American fighter planes in northern Iraq his European policy, even as it has than the Serbian army in Bosnia...

...Bush because it was not in his nature to do so, Clinton because he does not believe it...

...Peace in our time" is announced hours before another Bosnian town is carpet-bombed by the Serbs...

...Left to our own devices we would have waited longer, possibly beyond the moment of survival—a lesson rarely taught in our schools or in the popular press...

...Second, he went ahead with the terribly misguided "Clipper" chip project, which would insist that anyone in this country using encrypted communications would have to use a government–backed chip with a code that the government could decipher if it wished...

...The fight for individual liberty is indivisible, and a president who doesn't understand its importance in foreign policy isn't going to do much to advance it at home...

...If willingness to use force, for example, and Bush was a Bosnia wimp, Clinton has our intentions toward rogue countries like achieved cosmic wimpdom...

...48 The American Spectator July 1994...

...The most impressive achievement of Clinton diplomacy to date was Singapore's reducing by two the number of lashes convicted American vandal Michael Fay would receive...

...In Kosovo and Korea, we are going to have to show would–be aggressors that they will not survive the consequences of their aggression...

...47 that peace is the normal condition of mankind...

...Kosovo, Macedonia, Korea, and Iran are the future battlefields...

...Once he was in danger of losing it, he threw himself into the battle...

...if Bush per North Korea...

...We do not wish to be part of the outside world, but we do wish to change it, to democratize it, to make it more like us...

...Even now, as the antidemocratic forces gather strength and confidence, we may yet salvage something from the wreckage, but there is no hope that Clinton, Christopher, Lake, and Perry have the convictions or the stomach for such a fight...

...We continue to hold a unique view of history: we are the only people ever to believe 46 The American Spectator July 1994 Communists—only to abandon virtually mental secretaries making conflicting every campaign pledge within hours of statements on basic policy issues—our moving to Pennsylvania Avenue...

...You will say that it's hard to figure out where incompetence ends and living on the edge begins, and I agree...

...if Bush was neither do our allies and enemies...

...And as we are told in Proverbs, "Where there is no vision, the people perish...

...After all, Candidate Clinton ran from the right against Bush's foreign policy—accusing him of wimping out over Bosnia, selling lethal weapons to Saddam, and being soft on the Chinese The American Spectator July 1994 likely to accuse Warren Christopher of having a strategic vision, and the elevation of Talbott to the position of Secretary-in-Waiting was an instant failure...

...When his flacks start telling journalists that foreign policy is overwhehning the president's schedule, and the president himself says he spent most of a week worrying about Bosnia and Haiti, you know it's only spin control (as in the photo of national security adviser Anthony Lake standing next to propaganda chief David Gergen on the South Lawn, about to follow the Chief into the helicopter...

...Washington has been very short on vision ever since Reagan's departure...

...And why should we expect it to be otherwise...

...Many Clinton watchers have noted a habit of getting right up to the edge before rescuing himself at the last minute, a tendency that is easiest to see in his sexual antics...

...S o we have no international vocation, and our history attests to our reluctance to play the Great Game...

...And Clinton, whois probably the president most contemptuous of the citizenry since his hero John F. Kennedy, has shown his true stripes in two events along the Information Highway he purports to admire...

...Neither was inclined to insist that the rotten elites of the old tyrannies, whether Communist or not, be judged and condemned for their murderous acts...

...They are seized by what George Bush called The Vision Thing...

...we worry that our neighbors' labor costs are too low...

...Having based his career on a willingness to say most anything that his audience found appealing, he was...

...Back when the Evil Empire fell, and the world looked to us for guidance, we had to fight for our values—namely, the establishment of democratic capitalism and acknowledgment of the priority of laws over men and women—and insist that the forces of evil be removed from power whenever possible...

...We remember that our fathers ran from it,-and deep in our viscera the antibodies still multiply, to protect us against its poisons...

...His loose remarks about opening the gates to •usands to prepare for a desperate rush toward our shores, and Clinton had to backpedal in order to prevent an even greater loss of life...