Clinton Ducks Blame for September 11 in Interview with Chris Wallace

In an interview this weekend with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, former President Clinton responded angrily when he was asked why he didn't prevent the September 11 attacks. Clinton admitted that he "tried" to get Osama Bin Laden and "failed," and then tried to deflect attention from his failure by pointing fingers at the Bush Administration. Although the ABC/Disney movie Path to 9/11 was very unfair to President Bush, it has sparked discussion about all of the mistakes Clinton made, which was why Wallace asked the question. Many conservatives are objectively reassessing what Clinton did while in office and coming to the reluctant conclusion that he bears most of the blame for September 11. Although some conservatives, such as Ed Morissey and Britt Hume, say that "there's more than enough blame to go around," that just makes it seem as if Clinton and Bush share equal responsibility for what happened on September 11, which is simply not the case. And I don't think we should just focus on Clinton's failures before 9/11. His record on fighting terrorism since he has been out of office is also blameworthy.

Clinton's failure to fight the War on Terror effectively began early in his administration. On February 26, 1993, a little more than a month after he was inaugurated President, terrorists detonated bombs in the parking garage underneath the World Trade Center. Why didn't Clinton do anything to stop this terrorist attack? What was he doing during those 37 days that was more important than stopping the terrorists? These are questions that historians are going to ask when they look at the legacy of the Clinton Administration.

Clinton's response after the bombing was sluggish. It took six whole days before Mohammad Salameh, the first conspirator arrested in the bombings was apprehended. Other FBI raids that day led to the apartment of the mastermind of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, but he wasn't arrested until February 7, 1995, almost two years after the bombings. Meanwhile, Clinton took his eye off the ball and failed to stop the growing terrorist threat. On September 13 of that year Clinton welcomed PLO leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to the White House to sign a peace accord. This obsession with making peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis would occupy President Clinton right up until his last days in office and would take away his focus from the War on Terror. More than 13 years later there would still be no peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians so we can see that all of this effort was a big waste of time. In hindsight it is clear that President Bush had the right idea when he decided to do nothing at all about the Israeli-Palestinian problem as soon as he took office.

In October, a month after hosting the signing of the Middle East accord, American forces were attacked in Mogadishu, Somalia, an event that would later be known as "Black Hawk Down" and six months later Clinton withdrew forces from the country and turned it over to U.N. peacekeepers. Although the first President Bush sent American troops to Somalia, Clinton had almost a year to pull them out and he should have foreseen that, as Chris Wallace pointed out in his interview, this incident would lead inexorably to the September 11 attacks eight years later. In 1998 the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by Al Qaeda. Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and on a chemical plant in the Sudan and signed an executive order authorizing Bin Laden's arrest or assassination. At the time most people saw these inadequate actions for what they were, an attempt to distract the American people from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Instead of resigning, Clinton insisted on fighting and goaded Congress into impeaching him, which took the country's energy and attention away from the hunt for Bin Laden. Then on October 12, 2000, Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole. Although President Clinton still had three months left in office he once again failed to get Bin Laden or retaliate for the attacks and failed to adequately make the case to President Bush that he should do something about it.

The mistakes Clinton made are still having reverberations years after he made them. A new report by Bush's intelligence experts says that the invasion of Iraq has worsened the terrorist threat. Of course, we wouldn't have had to invade Iraq in the first place if Clinton hadn't left Hussein in power, which allowed Hussein to trick us into invading Iraq by making us think he had weapons of mass destruction by denying that he had weapons of mass destruction when he knew that we knew he was a liar. So if indeed it is true that the invasion of Iraq has made terrorism worse, then Clinton has a lot to answer for.

You might think that in the more than six years since Clinton left office he would have tried to correct some of his mistakes. But, in fact, his record on terrorism has only gotten worse since he became a private citizen. Although he now has plenty of free time, he apparently hasn't done anything to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice. Clinton promised to get Osama Bin Laden back in 1998 but seems to have made no progress in the eight years that have passed since then. By contrast, President Bush has only had a little more than six years to get Bin Laden.

Instead of focusing on fighting Islamofascism, Clinton has been pursuing pie-in-the-sky projects to spread democracy around the world and take care of less pressing problems like AIDS, poverty and global warming (which doesn't even exist!) with his Clinton Global Initiative. One of the reasons he was so angry at Chris Wallace for bringing up his responsibility for September 11 is that he wants people to focus on this project instead of his failures in the War on Terror. By distracting us with Utopian projects and playing on our fears about AIDS or global warming, he hopes we will forget about his failure to get Bin Laden or fight the War on Terror effectively since he has been out of office. Hopefully, when voters go to the polls this November, they will remember who is really responsible for making us less safe and hold his party accountable.

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