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TFF
PressInfo # 113
Clinton
missed the greatest
opportunity of our age
By JONATHAN
POWER
February 18th, 2001
LONDON - He was one of us, I always say, a child of the
sixties and seventies, an anti-war protestor, and
idealist, and very clever to boot. Moreover he knew
poverty and family hardship first hand. It was in his
soul to try and make the world a better place, you would
have thought. But he blew it, for himself, for his
country and for all of us. If an artist were commissioned
to paint the eight years of the presidency of Bill
Clinton it would be a landscape of missed
opportunities.
About five years ago I had lunch with the Pulitzer
Prize winning editorialist, Paul Greenberg, and my
misgivings all fell into place. Greenberg won his
formidable reputation as the editorial page editor of the
Pine Bluff Commercial, a paper with a circulation of
20,000 out in the sticks of rural Arkansas. "In all his
years as governor of Arkansas I never saw him as a
reformer"; said Greenberg, "he was a trimmer, a waffler.
I give you one example. He talked a great game on the
race issue, but Arkansas didn't get a Civil Rights Act
until after Clinton was gone." So he had always been like
that. During the presidential campaign we had simply been
taken in by his charm and energy.
He won the presidency at a time when America was
arguably ready for anything. The Cold War that had
consumed the energies of a whole generation was over.
Major war was a distant memory. America was about to
enter a new era of prosperity. He had the great facility
of communication and the American public was prepared to
lean over backward to allow this relatively young man to
pick up the mantle of the assassinated John F. Kennedy
and lead it into pastures new. He didn't do it. It
quickly turned out that he had no vision, no deep
convictions, and no overriding purpose. One of his first
acts, presumably to quieten the Pentagon that was nervous
and antagonistic because of his draft-dodging the Vietnam
War, was to launch a cruise missile attack on Iraq. Eight
years of bombing Iraq have taken the undermining of
Saddam Hussein not one step forward, and the American-led
embargo has meanwhile created enormous suffering for the
ordinary people of Iraq, in particular the children.
A short while after the cruise missile attack he made
the decision to pull American troops out of Somalia where
they were supposed to be part of a United Nations
peace-keeping force. In fact they had operated
independently under the direct authority of U.S. Southern
Command in Florida and had decided to engage in combat
with one of the rebel leaders in a very non-UN way. It
leads to the deaths of eighteen American soldiers.
Instead of taking the blame himself Clinton turned on the
UN. For the rest of his term the UN has remained the bete
noire of much of the American public, an easy target for
Senator Jesse Helms who has tried to starve it of U.S.
funding. This should have been the era of the UN coming
into its own with the Security Council working in
harmony, as the Charter mandated, to end "the scourge of
war". Ironically, there was more of this under his
predecessor, George Bush, than there was in Clinton's own
administration.
Indeed, substantive progress in building a sane and
sober relationship with post-communist Russia occurred
more under Bush than Clinton. Under Bush there was
serious nuclear disarmament. Under Clinton, as the former
Soviet president, Mikhael Gorbachev, recently observed
"disarmament moved further during the last phase of the
Cold War than during the period at its end". For all
Bush's conservatism there was no indication that he had
serious thoughts of expanding Nato up to the frontiers of
Russia.
Yet, in an effort to woo Polish, Baltic and other east
European votes in the mid-West Clinton promised to do -
and did - exactly that. As the great Russian expert and
former ambassador to Moscow, George Kennan has observed,
"it was the most fateful error of American policy in the
entire post-Cold War era." From then on the relationship
with Russia was doomed to be an uncertain and difficult
one; before the U.S. had had the chance of making Russia
a real friend, even a part of the western world.
Even modest step forwards to cap the nuclear genie
came to naught. Clinton lost the Senate vote on
ratification of the Test Ban Treaty, an American
initiative and a key element in forestalling nuclear
proliferation, because he left it to the last minute to
publicly campaign for it. It fell between his open
fingers much to dismay of his western allies and added to
the widening malaise that said in effect "if the West is
not interested in taking serious steps towards nuclear
disarmament why should we?" India and Pakistan's decision
to go openly nuclear owes much to the climate of opinion
that Clinton's lack of activity on nuclear issues
engendered.
It was the same at home. A run of appalling murders in
schools by pupils toting guns should have sparked Clinton
into full throttle action. He should have told the
American public that this was the last straw, that the
gun lobby had gone too far and that it was time to join
the civilised consensus in the rest of the West and
disarm at home. After his 1996 re-election he had nothing
to lose. He could afford, if necessary, to be
unpopular.
But then he would have to have been a different kind
of character. As Paul Greenberg says, "Clinton has gone
through life careless about other people. He has no moral
compass. There is a lot of sentimentality in the man. He
can be sentimental about others, but he's mainly
sentimental about himself."
Now it's goodbye to President Clinton. It should not
be a fond farewell. The great historical opportunity that
was open to him was squandered. Our generation's big
chance to build a better world was frittered away.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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