Between Iraq and a Hard Place
Between Iraq and a Hard Place For about five days this month, thanks to Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole got into something that looked like an actual debate over foreign policy. That...
...Clinton and the Democrats are vulnerable on foreign policy...
...But the Republican challenge on foreign policy ebbed before it really even picked up steam...
...It is foreign policy, after all, not new toll-free 1-800 numbers or even tax cuts, that makes the American presidency, as candidates like to say, “the most important job in the world...
...But there was a reason why the political mini-offensive Republicans launched against the administration’s Iraq policy was destined to sputter out...
...President Clinton and his political advisers were so eager to get off the subject of Iraq and back “on message” that the administration actually took what looked like an easy foreign policy success and turned it into something that now looks more like a failure...
...The United States ought not let people in a U.S.-backed U.N...
...For instance, after years of attacking the Clinton administration for engaging in do-good interventionism in Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia, the Republicans were ill-placed to criticize Clinton for not standing behind America’s commitments to the oppressed and beleaguered Kurds...
...Dole has an opportunity both to challenge the president’s conduct and to bring his party out of its own foreign policy quagmire...
...Anyone who remembered Sen...
...America’s role remains unique...
...This is the correct Republican stance, rather than the constant warnings against quagmires, Vietnams, and Somalias...
...While our military is stretched ever thinner by assignments in the Gulf, Bosnia, and elsewhere, leading House Democrats like David Obey and George Miller talk about slashing the defense budget if they regain control of the House...
...That was nice, because unlike education and crime, where a president’s influence is indirect and limited, foreign policy is a huge and unavoidable part of the president’s job...
...By background, temperament, and conviction, Bob Dole understands the president’s primary responsibility as commander in chief...
...Clinton’s timid conduct as a military leader has more in common with what Republicans have been saying for the past three and a half years than some of them would now like to admit...
...But the present relatively benign state of affairs in the world was created by American power and influence...
...Now would be a good time for Dole to give a major foreign policy speech that places Iraq in a wider context...
...GOP leaders had laid none of the theoretical groundwork for their criticisms...
...And it was good to see Republicans attacking the president not for doing too much (though Phil Gramm did just that), but for doing too little to defend American interests, principles, and allies abroad...
...The Republican party was the defender of American power and influence for the last couple of decades of the Cold War, much to the country’s benefit and the electoral advantage of GOP candidates...
...That’s too bad, because there were two big problems with Clinton’s response to Saddam’s actions in northern Iraq...
...Democratic weakness in foreign and defense policy remains a legitimate target for Republicans...
...Defense of the Kurds did not pass that test...
...We don’t share the view that the little Clinton did in Iraq was worse than nothing...
...John McCain’s opposition to the use of U.S...
...Foreign policy would be a good place to start...
...the Republican party’s leadership in foreign policy remains vital...
...Sure, the Cold War is over...
...McCain has consistently opposed risking American lives unless what he calls “vital national security interests” are threatened...
...His top foreign policy advisers did want to use the recent debate over Iraq as a way to begin the broader discussion of foreign policy issues that has been missing from the campaign...
...Or consider the question of the use of force...
...safe area (even of the no-fly variety) get overrun by a brute like Saddam, especially when thousands of them had risked their lives allying themselves to us...
...The administration’s response should have been disproportionate, as defense secretary William Perry warned it was going to be before the president backed off...
...Nothing would have been worse than doing nothing...
...And second, far too little weight was given by the administration to our moral responsibility to the Kurds...
...Indeed, the Clinton administration, by focusing on strategic “containment” of Saddam and eschewing any involvement in the complex Kurdish problem, sounded uncannily like the Bush administration when it insisted on “containing” the Bosnian conflict and eschewed involvement in the “quagmire” of Balkan ethnic disputes...
...Dole has said that, if it would help, he would be willing to be Reagan...
...Saddam, Deutch told Congress, “has gotten stronger politically in the region” in the last six weeks...
...But we’re amazed that the president, who over the past couple of years appeared to have overcome his aversion to foreign policy, seems to have reverted to his 1993 attitude, as when he dismissed a reporter’s recent question about Bosnia by saying, “What I got elected to do was to let America look at our own problems...
...The world remains dangerous...
...First, as a response to the strategic danger posed by Saddam, firing two volleys of cruise missiles at mostly unmanned targets was inadequate...
...But it looks like the foreign policy portion of this campaign ended almost as soon as it began—which was, as far as both candidates were concerned, plenty soon enough...
...Dole took the right and courageous stance on Bosnia, and basically the right stance on Iraq...
...This is so unassailably true that one of the senior members of Clinton’s own foreign policy team, CIA director John Deutch, found himself obliged last week to contradict his president’s positive assessment of the U.S...
...action in Iraq...
...It should have been designed not just to warn and contain Saddam but to hurt him and undermine his control...
...Now he needs to explain more broadly why the United States must play an active role in these and other troubled areas of the world, why some American sacrifices are worthwhile when what are at stake are American principles and America’s credibility as the world’s preeminent defender of those principles...
...Clinton’s continued lack of seriousness in this endeavor, after almost four years in office, is genuinely disturbing...
...While the need for American global leadership is more evident than ever, Clinton is once again vacillating and apprehensive...
...air power in Bosnia, lest a single American pilot be shot down in Balkan skies, could only marvel at his open contempt for President Clinton’s exclusive use of cruise missiles against Saddam...
...In fact, every president is elected above all to look after America’s role in the world...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 3
