Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

Clinton’s Legacy Watch # 42: A United States that is ‘The World’s Only Superpower’ no More

May 10, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): You have to hand it to Bill Clinton.
Not everyone could squander so
thoroughly the incredible hand he was dealt in international affairs. Thanks most especially to the efforts of Ronald Reagan and his team, when Mr. Clinton and
Al
Gore came to office declaring that “it’s the economy, stupid,” the United States was indisputably
the world’s only superpower — its military, strategic and economic preeminence unchallenged and
unassailable.

Where We are Now

Six years later, the U.S. is still in a class by itself as measured by the strength of its economy
and
the technological prowess of its military forces. Yet, in recent days, the signs are unmistakable:
America is increasingly seen by other nations as a waning power that can be challenged
with impunity and assailed without consequence.

China

The most palpable sign of this diminished status was evident over the weekend.
In the eyes
of the Communist Chinese, Bill Clinton’s America is a paper tiger, not a superpower.
This
was the unmistakable message conveyed by the violent demonstrations against U.S. diplomatic
missions that the PRC government organized in the wake of the accidental bombing of China’s
embassy in Belgrade.

These demonstrations featured the state-arranged bussing of tens of thousands of students to
the
environs of the U.S. embassy in Beijing, followed by police-supervised rock-throwing that
Ambassador Jim Sasser has said destroyed every window in the Beijing embassy. At least one
Molotov cocktail was tossed into the embassy’s ground floor, endangering not only this bit of
sovereign American territory but Mr. Sasser, two of his senior subordinates and eight of the
mission’s Marine guards, all of whom the Ambassador described as “hostages” of the officially
sanctioned mayhem. So much for Chinese government guarantees of our diplomats’ personal
safety.

The calculated insult intended by these actions was reinforced by the fact that the Chinese did
not
interfere with Amb. Sasser’s ability to conduct a slew of interviews with the American media on
Sunday, describing how he, his family and staff were suffering at his hosts’ hands. The image of a
pitiful, helpless giant could hardly have been better conveyed than by the obviously exhausted
former Senator’s listing for successive television and radio audiences of how long it had been
since he had any real sleep (fifty-plus hours), the lack of food at the embassy and his concerns
about the well-being of dependents and staff elsewhere in China.

China’s contempt for a corrupt and decadent America is also on display in its
response to
the unfolding scandal concerning PRC penetration of the U.S. nuclear weapons
laboratories and successful acquisition of strategic “dual-use” technologies. Beijing has
simply put the arm on American corporations anxious to do business with China, encouraging
them to unleash their lobbyists on Capitol Hill with a view to ensuring that revelations about
Chinese intelligence and tech-theft operations do not translate into meaningful retribution.

The upshot of all this is not that China has emerged as an equal, a superpower set
to rival the
United States on its own terms and in the near future. While it would be a serious mistake to
ignore that prospect in the early 21^st Century, we should see in the present
episode as an early
taste of what might be called “the New, New World Order”: A global environment in
which bad actors have taken America’s measure and found that it is either unable or
unwilling to use its immense power effectively creating vacuums for others to fill.

Other Would-be ‘Vacuum’ Fillers

Examples of such vacuum-filling abound:

The Russians are exploiting it to negotiate terms that will ensure that
their client in Belgrade,
Slobodan Milosevic, not only survives the present NATO air war but is rewarded for his
predations in Kosovo (and the preceding ones in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia). As things
stand now, in addition to having the privilege of committing large numbers of American troops
to an open-ended peacekeeping assignment in Kosovo, the U.S. taxpayer will be obliged to pay
what will amount to war reparations for the rebuilding of Milosevic’s economy and
infrastructure.

The North Koreans have just euchred the United States and Japan
respectively into providing
$500 million in food aid and well over a billion in nuclear reactor-related funding. These
concessions, we are assured, have nothing to do with the U.S. being allowed, finally, to send
inspectors to look at a huge underground facility that Pyongyang is suspected of building to
conceal its ongoing, covert nuclear weapons program. It is a safe bet, however, that the
inspectors will find no “smoking gun” since the North Koreans have had at least two months to
reconfigure or otherwise hide evidence of its activities in this facility.

Saddam Hussein continues to beard the United States by threatening the
pilots enforcing the
“no-fly” zone over Iraq, even as he makes headway at the UN in unraveling what remains of
the international consensus on the Iraqi sanctions regime. Five months have elapsed since the
inspectors were last on the ground in Iraq; the best estimate has been that, once such
inspections stopped, it would only take Saddam half-a-year to get his weapons of mass
destruction programs back on line.

Yasser Arafat chose to defer his declaration of a Palestinian state prior to
the Israeli elections
— but only because his doing otherwise might help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keep
his job. At the same time, the PLO has dusted off the 1947 UN Resolution 181, claiming that
it entitles the Palestinians to large chunks of what is today’s Israel and the “internationalizing”
of Jerusalem. These claims, which have been endorsed by the European Union and UN
officials, could well set the predicate for the next Middle East war.

The Bottom Line

In short, the real danger of the present debacle is not merely that the Clinton Administration
will
want to reward Beijing for its contemptuous, premeditated acts of violence by admitting the PRC
into the World Trade Organization, giving China a pass on its espionage and tech theft activities
and/or other concessions. It is that the perception that the United States is no longer a force to be
reckoned with and is, instead, a declining power to be taken advantage of by lesser but audacious
nations. History teaches us that such situations invite conflict,
usually at great expense to
American national interests, national treasure and, most importantly, lives.

Given this history, the question must be asked: Why would the Clinton Administration act in
ways that serve to erode America’s superpower status, its prestige and credibility and, in all
likelihood, create a more dangerous world in the process? The answer seems to lie with
the
counterculture experience and mindset of many of its senior officials, starting with the
President, himself. They were schooled in a tradition that held that excessive U.S.
power gave
rise to the Vietnam debacle and are driven by the perceived need to prevent a reprise through
whatever means are possible (including unilateral reductions in military capabilities and
subordinating American freedom of action to multilateral institutions and constraints).
Unfortunately, their success in implementing such a policy approach — and thereby effectively
ending this Nation’s status as the world’s only superpower — is virtually sure to translate into
successive, terrible failures for United States’ security policy.

Sales Pitch For a Balkan Farce

May 6, 1999Center for Security Policy

The answer is “Madonna.” Formulate the question.

The question is: What is the name of the discotheque, located in Slobodan Milosevic’s
hometown
of Pozarevac, and owned by Milosevic’s son, Marko, that NATO might bomb as a “signal” of
seriousness?

Last week, after NATO bombed Pozarevac, The Post reported:

“NATO military sources said the attack on Pozarevac was designed to send a chilling signal
to
the inner circle of the Yugoslav leadership, which includes several members of Milosevic’s
extended family. . . . ‘We are going to draw the noose around them until it starts to hurt,’ said a
senior U.S. policy-maker. ‘When people like Marko start to feel the pain of this air campaign,
then Milosevic might wake up and come to his senses.’ “

Milosevic is frightening. So is the thinking of that “senior U.S. policy-maker.”

Nowadays no diplomatic farce is complete without a cameo appearance by Jesse Jackson.
Media
raptures about his brokering of the release of the three U.S. soldiers have underscored for
Milosevic America’s aversion to even the mildest costs of combat. But, then, surely Milosevic
noticed when President Clinton visited with the family of one of the captured soldiers. A nation
serious about military objectives would not advertise its distress about three prisoners.

“I think,” says Yale’s Donald Kagan, author of “On the Origins of War,” speaking of the
United
States today, “you have to go all the way back, nearly 2000 years, to the Roman Empire, to find a
single power so preeminent compared to all others.” True, but neither economic nor military
preeminence necessarily translates into effective power, absent a certain hardness that could be
called Roman.

Perhaps somewhere near Brussels is a warehouse stuffed with ballpoint pens, stationery, ash
trays and other things emblazoned with NATO’s logo. Perhaps NATO intends to stay in business
until all that stuff is used up. Or until the bombing campaign achieves the objectives about which
NATO says it will not compromise. Whichever comes first.

Clinton says the bombing may continue into the summer. It probably will not, for two
reasons.

First, before Milosevic is toppled by his supposedly disgruntled military (NATO’s hope du
jour),
NATO’s determination to continue punishing Serbia may be sapped by television pictures of the
wretchedness NATO is trying to produce in Serbia, as when the power goes off in pediatric and
geriatric hospital wards. Second, Clinton surely shares the high estimate of himself that “a senior
administration official” recently expressed to the New York Times. The official explained that
Clinton, although he has ruled out compromise with Milosevic, will be able to compromise:
“Once Clinton decides that’s what he’s going to do, he’ll sell it. If Nixon could sell the fall of
Saigon as peace with honor, Clinton can sell this.”

More farce: Gerald Ford was president when Saigon fell. But when there is no penalty for
failure,
failures proliferate — like these senior administration officials who are saying these astonishing
things about the debacle they have produced.

Unless the emptying of Kosovo becomes the first Balkan diaspora to be reversed, what
Clinton
will try to sell as a NATO success will be Milosevic’s success in radically and permanently
altering the demographics of that province. Even if the Kosovars had homes to return to, they
know that sooner or later — years, perhaps decades, hence — whatever compromise
“peacekeeping” force is cobbled together to make Kosovo safe will leave. Serbia will still be
what and where it is — fierce and next door. Kosovars know that a synonym for “safe area” is
Srebrenica.

NATO’s minuet of capitulation has begun, accompanied by the U.S. media’s celebration of
Jesse
Jackson’s “success.” How likely is it that Milosevic, Jackson’s partner in prayer, is going to be
deposed and put on trial?

It is deeply demoralizing, and perhaps even de-moralizing, for civilized people to watch
justice
traduced. In recent years Americans have been mesmerized by the extremely public spectacles of
O. J. Simpson essentially getting away with murder and Bill Clinton essentially getting away
with perjury and obstruction of justice. Now Milosevic may be getting away with war crimes on
a scale not seen in Europe since the Third Reich collapsed 54 years ago this week.

It collapsed as Soviet soldiers reached the center of Berlin after that city had been bombed
for
several years and pounded by artillery for weeks. And some of the city’s trams were still running,
a fact that may not be known by those who are conducting today’s war, 30 years after they
militantly sang, in the words of an old spiritual, “Ain’t gonna study war no more.”

‘Peace in our time’

May 6, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The United States will rue the day it entered into the “agreement” on
Kosovo announced today by the so-called “G-8” foreign ministers. As with most defeats,
America will find itself humiliated, its strategic interests harmed and its Treasury depleted by the
obligation to pay costly war reparations. By contrast, the victors — Slobodan Milosevic and his
Russian sponsors — will find new legitimacy, an enhancement of their strategic position in the
region “and more generally,” and be the beneficiaries of vast sums of U.S.-subsidized international
largesse.

Worst of all, this deal will signal to Yevgeny Primakov’s other clients — from North Korea to
Iraq
to Cuba — that this U.S. government can be counted on to reward, rather than punish, the most
despicable and aggressive behavior. History teaches us that such signals tend to beget such
behavior, not deter it.

What’s Wrong With This Picture

The following are just a few of the problems that will arise from President Clinton’s latest
expediency-driven bit of policy ad hocery:

Milosevic will remain in power, probably unindicted, certainly unrepentant, and
ready to
strike again.

The Russians will be rewarded for their willingness to reoccupy part of Eastern
Europe — a part, at that, they were unable to wrest from Marshal Tito five decades ago.
What
will the full cost prove to be, in political, strategic and economic terms?

The fact that the Russians would not agree to mention NATO in
connection with the
“international” force to be inserted in Kosovo does not mean that NATO will not have
to foot the bill, just that it will not run the show.

The UN Security Council will become the final arbiter — a further sign
that NATO’s, to
say nothing of the United States’, freedom of action is being circumscribed.

It seems unlikely that there will really be a “semi-permissive” environment in
Kosovo.
The Serb forces will not completely leave; the Kosovo Liberation Army will wage guerilla war;
and American and other international forces will be caught in the cross-fire.

Under those circumstances, it seems hard to believe that “all the
refugees” will actually
return home — even if they had someplace to return to.

The American taxpayer will be obliged to pay the lion’s share of the huge costs
associated with rebuilding not only Kosovo, but Milosevic’s Serbia, as well.

America’s defense resources will be further dissipated by the diversion of
funds needed to
pay for the care and feeding of the refugees (not only at Fort Dix, but in theater) and those
associated with rebuilding Serbia. Replenishment of the war stocks squandered in this
campaign will be slow in coming and probably incomplete — leaving the U.S. military even less
prepared to deal with the real, strategically significant “contingencies” now in the
offing.

The unbowed Milosevic will almost certainly insist that the deal be sweetened
further.
The Russians will be only too happy to oblige, adding further to the ignominy of NATO’s
defeat and the glory of the Kremlin’s jujitsu. And the Clinton Administration will
neither want
nor be able to say “No.”

The Bottom Line

The troubling portent of the diplomatic handwriting on the wall was sufficiently obvious that
—
even before the “G-8” ministers did their thing — two of the Nation’s most perspicacious
columnists, George Will and href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=99-D_55a1″>Jeff Jacoby, this morning published the attached columns,
respectively in the Washington Post and Boston Globe, — anticipating the
collapse of the
Clinton/NATO position on Kosovo. As Mr. Will observed:

It is deeply demoralizing, and perhaps even de-moralizing, for civilized
people to watch justice traduced.

For his part, Mr. Jacoby concluded:

Such is
Clinton’s legacy to the world. History will not be kind.

National Review, Cox, and WSJ prime missile defense debate in Congress

February 25, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The debate in the House Armed Services Committee this morning on H.R. 4 — legislation that would declare it "to be the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense" — has been helpfully framed by several noteworthy inputs from two of the Nation’s most influential organizations of the Fourth Estate and a recent speech by a senior member of the House of Representatives. Comments by distinguished essayists in the National Review, an editorial by the Wall Street Journal and a major address by Representative Chris Cox (R-CA) make clear that America at this point has no choice but to proceed with the deployment of an effective anti-missile system as soon as technologically possible.

As Usual, National Review Points the Way

In a 22 February edition largely devoted to the missile defense issue, National Review’s distinguished Editor-at-Large, William F. Buckley, Jr., introduces four extraordinary essays concerning the history of, strategic imperative behind and opposition to the near-term deployment of anti-missile defenses. As Mr. Buckley puts it: "The articles…are a contribution…to an understanding of the need to document our commitment to our freedoms by an act of faith in our scientific resources." Among the highlights of these articles by former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, best-selling author Mark Helprin,Washington Times national security correspondent Bill Gertz and former Washington Post White House reporter Lou Cannon were the following (emphasis added throughout):

Amb. Kirkpatrick: "As in the past, we Americans can defend our freedom and our lives only if we are strong enough to deter or defeat an attack. Our defense must keep pace with developments in weapons, technology, and tactics.

"Democratic governments have a special need for defense because modern democracies do not fight aggressive wars. Aggressive dictatorship, however, are frequently ready to undertake expansionist adventures for no cause but their own appetites. No objective reason was required to motivate Iraq to attack Kuwait. Or North Korea to advance against the South. Regimes that habitually use coercion against their own subjects find it natural to turn their aggressions on others.

"This tendency of expansionist dictatorships to start wars is the most powerful reason that the United States and other democratic governments need urgently to be able to defend themselves against today’s dictatorships, armed as they are with nearly complete weapons of mass destruction."

Bill Gertz: "Since taking office in 1993, the Clinton Administration has undertaken a systematic program that must be described as anti-anti-missile defense. Despite promising to build defenses against short-range missile attacks as soon as possible, President Clinton and his senior national-security officials have adopted a policy of delay and obfuscation intended to maintain the defenseless status quo. And it is not clear even now– in the wake of the Administration’s calls to renegotiate the ABM Treaty — that it is willing to abandon its arms-control orthodoxy. 1

"The administration continues to argue that without the treaty there is a risk of a new arms race with Russia. I asked Assistant Secretary of Defense Ted Warner if he honestly believed Russia can afford an arms race, given that its economy is on the verge of collapse. He said, ‘Well, no, not right now,’ but perhaps in the future. Russia knows it is dealing with a president and an administration that care more about Cold War-style arms talks than about building defenses. So Moscow will continue to bully the administration by threatening to refuse to cut its missile force or to ratify START II. And why not? It has worked before."

Chairman Cox on the Stakes if the West is Left Undefended

In December, a bipartisan select committee created to examine the effects of U.S. technology flows to Communist China and chaired by Rep. Cox completed its work. 2 In his first major public address since his committee’s voluminous classified report — which concluded that "harm has been caused" American interests by the transfer of missile-related technologies to the PRC — was turned over for sanitizing and release by the executive branch, Rep. Cox told the European-Atlantic Group in London on 18 February:

"Even now, in return for American access to a single subterranean facility that could be used to house nuclear reprocessing, North Korea has asked for $300 million; for halting its trade in missiles to destabilizing states, $500 million; for simply agreeing to talks about any of these concerns, North Korea demands millions of tons of food that its corrupt and perverse economic policies cannot produce.

"What would we do if, in analogous circumstances, an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction blackmailed our NATO ally Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, or Israel? And if destitute Pyongyang is launching three-stage missiles with a 4,000-6,000 kilometer range, how long will it be before Baghdad can threaten Western Europe itself? If these circumstances arose today, our governments would have no good, or even minimally acceptable, options. It follows, therefore, that our only realistic option is to use the short remaining time we have to seek to ensure that these circumstances never arise….In sum, the West has no realistic option but to seek a shield against these emerging threats with the strongest possible missile defenses."

The Wall Street Journal Eviscerates Clinton for His Flim-Flam on Defending America

On 17 February, the Wall Street Journal published a lead editorial entitled "Missile Defense Decisions" (see the attached) that not only convincingly made the case for the deployment of a missile defense system, but also assailed the Clinton Administration’s highly contradictory stance on this issue. As the Journal put it:

"…The Administration is…hemming and hawing about a national missile defense, which it claimed last month it now supports after years of saying that any threat of ballistic missile attack was way off in the future. Though it hasn’t been brought to the attention of most Americans, the North Korean missiles that Seoul and Tokyo are so worried about can reach Alaska, Hawaii and maybe other parts of the U.S. The Japanese Defense Agency told Japanese news organizations just yesterday that North Korea possesses enough technology to build a ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland." (Emphasis added.)

The Bottom Line

The time has clearly come to change U.S. policy from one of assuring the American people’s vulnerability to missile attack to one of assuring that they are defended against it.3Washington Post, the Kremlin is now claiming that its new Topol-M road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile will be invulnerable to anti-missile systems. While it is unclear whether there is any more truth to this statement than to recent, fraudulent Russian claims that a new stealth fighter is nearing deployment, the fact that Moscow believes it has such a capability should obviate any further objections from that corner to the U.S. deployment of anti-missile systems intended to protect this country from other missile-wielding enemies.

Interestingly, votes to do just that in the Senate Armed Services Committee on 10 February and today in its House counterpart, come as one of the last bases for opposing such as step is seemingly falling apart: According to reports in today’s

1This policy approach is evident, for example, in the letter National Security Advisor Samuel Berger sent to Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) on February 3, 1999: "We intend to base the deployment decision on an assessment of the technology (based on an initial series of rigorous flight-tests) and the proposed system’s operational effectiveness. In addition, the President and his senior advisors will need to confirm whether the rogue state ballistic threat to the United States has developed as quickly as we now expect, as well as the costs to deploy.

"A decision regarding NMD deployment must also be addressed within the context of the ABM Treaty and our objectives for achieving future reductions in strategic offensive arms through START II and III. The ABM Treaty remains a cornerstone of strategic stability, and Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agree that it is of fundamental significance to achieving the elimination of thousands of strategic nuclear arms under these treaties."

2 See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled The Real Case Against Bill Clinton: Chinese BriberyNo. 99-D 01, 4 January 1999). (

3 See Clinton’s Opposition to Cochran-Inouye Missile Defense Bill Offers Proof of His Abiding Hostility to Defending America (No. 99-D 21, 10 February 1999).

Foreign Lenders Head For The Exits In China

February 9, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Roughly one year ago, the Casey Institute made a bold prediction early
in
Asia’s dramatic financial downturn: “The next shoe to drop in Asia is likely to be China.” ¹ By
contrast, the conventional wisdom held that the PRC would remain insulated from the region’s
economic dislocation due to China’s non-disclosure or “fudging” of financial statistics, the
non-convertibility of its currency, its seemingly impressive hard currency reserves (which could
be
called upon to prop-up its bad-debt-laden banking sector), and the fact that it still enjoyed at the
time robust foreign direct investment (which should have enabled liquidity shortfalls to be
postponed, or at least blurred).

The attached editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal bears out the Casey
Institute’s
prognosis that nothing short of a complete restructuring of China’s financial and banking
systems would stave off a slow-motion economic train wreck in the PRC. It also
suggests
that those who bet on the conventional wisdom have learned a costly — but useful —
lesson. ²

The Squeeze

By the time China allowed Guandong International Trade and Investment Company (GITIC)
to
go under in late October of last year, the trend was apparent: Thanks, in large part, to the
“emerging market” meltdown that occurred in late 1997 and in 1998, the mainland experienced a
sharp reduction in foreign direct investment flows. As the Wall Street Journal
reported on 8
February 1999, this flow of capital suffered a roughly 50% drop-off in the corresponding periods
in 1997 and 1998. When the government walked away from one of its largest so-called
international trade and investment companies (ITICs) in Guangdong — thereby permitting it to
default on roughly $4.7 billion of hard currency debt, much of it owed to foreign investors and
creditors — an already apprehensive market was further shaken.

In the wake of this decision, the Institute pointed out that — notwithstanding the long-term
economic benefits that would accrue if such insolvent entities were allowed to go belly-up — the
short-term effect would be to exacerbate an already serious liquidity squeeze in the ensuing
months: “[T]he closing of GITIC could well be the first step toward a debilitating, nation-wide
liquidity crisis.” ³

As it happens, that liquidity crisis is continuing to intensify according to reports in the 8
February
editions of the London Financial Times: “Several foreign banks are taking more
aggressive steps
to recover money from Chinese borrowers, such as calling in loans and demanding accelerated
debt repayments[and] international lenders have begun cutting off credit to Chinese
borrowers.”

The reason for this seeming race to reduce Western credit exposure in China is clear:
Foreign
creditors and investors are now questioning the ability of Chinese entities to repay loans
and the government’s willingness to step in if default appears imminent. Unlike the cases
of
Russia, South Korea and Thailand, where sovereign debt crises served to worsen liquidity
problems in the private sector, China has taken pains to cordon off its “economic zones” from a
still-solvent central government. If the accelerated loan repayments, diminished credit lines and
declining interbank deposits seem at the moment unlikely to spur a wholesale economic collapse,
they do appear to be symptoms of more serious problems to come.

‘Red Chips’ in the Red?

In addition to the increasing financial pressure which China now confronts, a number of other
worrying indicators have hit the computer screens of global traders and investment bankers this
year:

China’s Civil Aviation Administration has indicated that the country will have to
delay the
delivery of an unspecified number of new airplanes (at least 50) slated to arrive before
the
year 2002, ostensibly because capacity outstrips demand in a sluggish travel market.

Shandong International Power Development Company postponed indefinitely a
scheduled $285 million initial public offering (IPO) due to “highly volatile market
conditions.” Of particular interest was the lead manager’s inability to garner orders from
“the
six investment banks it hired to help sell the shares.” More importantly, this offering —
along
with two others which have recently been withdrawn — was seen by many market observers as
a litmus test of China’s post-GITIC credit environment.

The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong has lost nearly 25% of its value
since 1 January with
so-called “red-chips” hit particularly hard.

Individually, any of these developments would probably be seen as constituting little
more
than a temporary glitch in the system. Taken together, however, they illustrate the fraying of
market confidence in China.

Bottom Line

Beijing’s decision not to prop up ailing regional investment trusts has proven to be, at least in
the
short-run, a momentous decision. As the Casey Institute expected, a liquidity crisis has emerged
as foreign lenders and investors quickly appreciated that “moral hazard” — or the
government
intervening to make them whole — was no longer a sure thing in China. The jury is still
out:
Has the Chinese government triaged its financial sector by permitting selected bankruptcies while
implementing needed structural reforms, particularly with respect to the huge overhang of
non-performing loans? Or will this sector wind up taking greater-than-expected hits as foreign
capital
flows contract, exports suffer (as the firms most immediately affected are manufacturers and
conduits for exports), growth slows to below 7% and China is forced to devalue its currency later
this year?

Notwithstanding some $140 billion in advertized reserves — much of it invested in U.S.
Treasuries
— the Institute predicts that the latter scenario is the more likely to materialize,
with the
consequent, serious blowback in prospect for an already beleaguered Hong Kong. The
Wall
Street Journal editorial, while largely confirming this gloomy prognosis, holds out this one
bit of
hope: Western lenders and investors may, at long last, be getting serious about their
creditworthiness and due diligence assessments in China.

If so, it is to be earnestly hoped that they will start asking questions often not delineated in
prospectuses and other documentation — such as the true identity of the Chinese borrowers and
their senior management, to whom do they report and what is the real purpose of the loans?
Should they adopt this prudent approach, chances are that not only will investors and lenders be
spared serious loses in China, but the prospect averted of serious harm to U.S. national security
arising from American capital markets underwriting what amounts to an increasingly menacing
Chinese military-industrial complex.

¹ See the Casey Institute Perspective entitled
How Bill Clinton Proposes To Spend The
‘Surplus’: Bailing Out Foreign Governments – And Their Western Underwriters ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-C_02″>No. 98-C 02,
7 January 1998).

¹ See Market Confidence In ‘China Inc.’
Appropriately Shaken — G.I.T.I.C. Bond Default A
Taste Of What Is To Come? (No. 98-C
177, 29 October 1998).

¹See Hedging Financial Bets In China: Will ‘ITIC’s’
And Other Entities With P.L.A.
Connections Be Bailed Out By Beijing? (No.
98-C 182, 12 November 1998).

Time to Face the Super-Thug Alone

January 8, 1999Center for Security Policy

Memo to the president: Forget Barzan. It is Barzani you want to enlist. And watch your back
at
the United Nations. Kofi Annan’s staff is out to knife American policy on Iraq and “rehabilitate”
Saddam Hussein.

This is the way 1999 starts for Bill Clinton in his long, expensive and inconclusive battle with
Saddam. But the three resolutions proposed above — which require Clinton to force the hand of
other players in this drama — could bring a blessedly unhappy New Year for the Iraqi dictator.

Barzan is Barzan al-Takriti, Saddam’s half-brother. During a diplomatic posting in Geneva,
Barzan conducted an elaborate covert dialogue for five years with the United States, which
provided visas and medical treatment in the United States for his wife, Ahlam, and other members
of his family.

These blandishments were offered in a forlorn attempt to persuade Barzan to mount a palace
coup
against a murderous sibling he had no intention of crossing. A CIA officer using the code name
Abu Eric who came to know Barzan and other Iraqi officials in Baghdad in the 1980s traveled
regularly from his Middle East post to meet with Barzan in Europe.

Barzan returned to Baghdad in November shortly after his wife died and was buried in
Switzerland. The CIA’s misguided palace coup effort produced no return on its investment and
inhibited other, more promising anti-Saddam operations. It is the kind of quick-fix operation that
the Clintonites will avoid if they are to get serious about the long-term campaign to overthrow
Saddam they have belatedly promised.

U.S. energy and funds should instead be focused on Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, whose
Pesh
Merga warriors and real estate are needed to mount an effective challenge to Baghdad. Barzani
must be made to understand that he will get serious U.S. support and protection — but only if he
breaks out of the working alliance he has maintained with Saddam since 1996 and joins a new
U.S.-supported resistance coalition.

Washington needs to take the same “It is time to choose” approach with U.N. Secretary
General
Kofi Annan, whose assistants this week used the media to try to decapitate the U.N. Special
Commission (UNSCOM) that runs arms inspections in Iraq and to make these inspections more
Saddam-friendly.

Annan’s staff aired anonymous complaints in The Washington Post that UNSCOM chief
inspector
Richard Butler had permitted the organization to be used by U.S. intelligence for spying on
Saddam. The secretary general’s assistants seemed shocked — yes, shocked — that an anti-Saddam
bias had crept into U.N. actions on Iraq.

Leave aside the bum information: Out of professional rivalry, the Central Intelligence Agency
has
done more to hinder effective intelligence gathering by UNSCOM than to help. More shocking is
the pretense by Annan’s aides that they are unaware that the international community is at war
with Saddam’s regime. Iraq was granted a cease-fire in the Gulf War on condition that it give up
its weapons of mass destruction and missiles. Iraq’s refusal to let UNSCOM verify its claims puts
Baghdad in active breach of the cease-fire contained in U.N. resolutions.

This is not a technical matter or a legalism. Saddam forced the United States to spend billions
of
dollars and stretch thin its armed forces in 1998, all without seriously weakening his dictatorship
or his store of terror weapons. His new burst of belligerence is intended to show that he survived
December’s 70-hour bombing spree conducted by the world’s only remaining superpower.
Super-Thug lives.

Annan’s people misjudge the temper of Washington on this issue. “Their undermining of
UNSCOM and economic sanctions will drive people who want to clear up the problem of U.S.
back dues and other problems into the confrontation camp and provoke a serious U.S.-U.N.
crisis,” a senior administration official said to me two weeks ago. This official accurately predicted
then that Butler’s head would soon be on the block.

The White House, already miffed with Annan over his handling of Iraq, will fight to protect
Butler, a senior official told me this week.

The sneak attack on Butler and the CIA should be a wake-up call: Washington now will have
to
rely less on multilateral efforts to contain and combat Saddam and act unilaterally more often to
protect U.S. vital interests abroad in 1999.

Clinton should treat this development as a liberation from bothersome restraints on U.S.
freedom
of action. He is considering appointing a high-level coordinator to handle Iraq, a step in the right,
unilateralist direction.

The need now is to lead, not to persuade. Other nations will follow an American president
who
makes clear he will protect U.S. national interests in the gulf or elsewhere by any means
necessary. This is what George Bush did in 1991.

Kofi Annan, Kurdish guerrillas and Saddam’s relatives will join in pushing the dictator out
only
when they are convinced that Saddam’s fate is sealed and that continuing to keep a foot in his
camp will do significant damage to them. They should no longer be given the choice of seeming
not to choose.

This does not mean the end of multilateralism or of hopes for a more effective United Nations
in
the future. Those goals can and should be attained. But they can be attained only under the
influence of strong U.S. leadership. The place to begin is Iraq, the time is now.

The Real Case Against Bill Clinton: Chinese Bribery

January 4, 1999Frank Gaffney, Jr.

(Washington, D.C.): Not since Al Capone was prosecuted for tax evasion has there been a
more
bizarre judicial pursuit of criminal activity than President Clinton’s impending trial for misdeeds in
connection with the Lewinsky Affair. As with the notorious Chicago gangster, if truly despicable
behavior could be brought to an end with the successful prosecution of nothing more than charges
of presidential perjury and obstruction of justice, so be it.

In the matter of President Clinton’s impeachment, however, it appears that he may “walk,”
thanks
to what are seen by at least one-third of the U.S. Senate to be inadequate grounds for his removal
from office. This prospect demands that prosecutors from the House of Representatives be
allowed not only to call witnesses. They must be permitted to make a larger case: Mr.
Clinton
has engaged in a crime specifically cited in the Constitution as an impeachable offense —
bribery.

Year of the Rat

The evidence for such a case is already before the Senate. In fact, it is has been submitted to
the
American people over the past four months in the form of a best-selling book, Year of the
Rat, by
two veteran and highly respected congressional staffers — Ed Timperlake and
Bill Triplett.

Year of the Rat documents three of the four conditions required under the law for
the prosecution
of a bribery charge: 1) actus reus, a voluntary action involving the acceptance of at
least one
bribe; 2) menes rea, culpable intent; and 3) concurrence causation, the connections
between the
bribes and actions they engendered — in this case to the considerable detriment of the national
security.

The Bribes

With respect to the voluntary action, Timperlake and Triplett document the myriad
ways in
which Mr. Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 campaigns were the beneficiaries of “contributions” from
individuals and organizations associated with Chinese military/intelligence. These included: “a
massive cascade of illegally laundered foreign funds” injected into key states in the general
election of 1972; “a multimillion-dollar loan from an Arkansas bank under the…influence [of
Chinese agents]”; “Chinese agents became the number one donors” to the Clinton campaign in
1992; “leaders of a Thai conglomerate that is in business with…China’s biggest arms smugglers
had a White House meeting with Clinton at which they were illegally solicited for campaign
donations”; “a People’s Liberation Army partner sat next to Clinton at a Democratic National
Committee fund-raiser and contributed thousands of dollars in illegal campaign funds to the
Democrats”; and “the officers of an American defense contractor in business with China’s missile
builders became the number one contributors” to the President’s reelection campaign in
1995-1996.”

Intent

Under the law, culpable intent can be established if the suspect has engaged in “reckless
endangerment.” This test is amply satisfied by the President’s surrounding himself with
individuals with ties to Beijing. These include his decades-long friendship with
Mochtar and
James Riady and with Charlie Trie. The former run a
Chinese-Indonesian empire which
funneled at least a million into Clinton and Democratic coffers in 1992. According to Messrs.
Timperlake and Triplett, the latter is a member of the Chinese “Four Seas” Triad gang. At the
very least, he behaved in a gangster-like fashion when, on 21 March 1996, he delivered nearly
simultaneously $460,000 to the President’s legal defense fund and a written demand that the U.S.
not interfere in China’s campaign of intimidation against Taiwan.

There are, as well, a gaggle of relative newcomers like: John Huang (a
Chinese expat and Riady
employee for whom Mr. Clinton secured a Top Secret clearance and senior position in the
Commerce Department); Johnny Chung (a struggling California businessman
whose more than
$350,000 in contributions to the DNC were believed to have come from foreign sources); and his
associate and apparent paymaster Liu Chaoying (a Lieutenant Colonel in the
PLA, alumna of its
spy school and daughter of the PLA’s former senior officer, General Liu Huaquing).

It is equally damning whether Mr. Clinton knew about and chose to ignore these
individuals’ connections to the PRC or was so indifferent to the danger they represented as
to seek no information about their troubling ties.

The Consequences

Then, there is the matter of what the Chinese appear to have gotten
for their bribes. The
transactions appear to fall into three categories: First, the Clinton Administration actively
appeased China. For example, there was Clinton’s explicit embrace last year of
the Chinese
position on Taiwan; his repeated, personal intervention to secure the former U.S. Navy base at
Long Beach for COSCO — Beijing’s package express service of choice for arms- smuggling,
drug-running, etc.; and his fomenting of ill-advised U.S.-PRC military-to-military ties.

Second, the Administration’s has deliberately failed to enforce anti-proliferation
laws —
including, incredibly, one named for Vice President Al Gore. Pursuant to the Gore-McCain Act,
Chinese sales of advanced cruise missiles to Iran (that may well be used to execute deadly attacks
against American naval vessels in a future conflict in the Persian Gulf) should have resulted in
sanctions against the PRC. Mr. Clinton finessed this legal requirement by ignoring, suborning and
misrepresenting the relevant intelligence. Under U.S. statutes, Chinese sales of nuclear
technology to Pakistan and Iran should also have triggered retaliatory measures.

Third, the Clinton team rewarded Beijing with a variety of initiatives that have enormously
abetted China’s longstanding efforts to secure military and dual-use
technology. The
indictment in this area includes: the Administration’s dismantling of the U.S. and international
export control regime, the assistance it permitted American aerospace firms to provide the
Chinese military space program; and access to advanced supercomputers, machine tools, jet
engine technology, etc.

The Cox Committee’s Finding

The fourth element necessary for a successful bribery prosecution has only become
available after the House voted to impeach President Clinton. On 30
December a bipartisan
select committee empaneled to look into the last of these areas unanimously concluded, according
to its chairman, Rep. Chris Cox (Republican of California), that real “harm has been caused” by
the sorts of policies governing Chinese access to U.S. technology embraced by Mr. Clinton.

Unfortunately, the Cox committee’s 700 pages of documentation of this harm is classified at
this
juncture — and will remain so until such time as the Clinton Administration sees fit to “sanitize” a
version that could be published for general consumption. If past experience is any guide, the
Clinton team should not be expected to cooperate in building the public case for the President’s
removal from office.

The Bottom Line

In short, the Senate must have a full-fledged trial to examine whether President Clinton has
engaged in “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The Senate will immeasurably compound the
damage Mr. Clinton has done to the national interest and security as a result of his bribery by
China if it refuses to seek testimony and act upon this most patently impeachable of crimes.

Clinton Legacy Watch #34: A Sovereign Palestinian State, A Weakened U.S.-Israeli Relationship, A Greater Danger of War

December 14, 1998Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): For many Americans, Bill Clinton’s latest foray into Middle East
diplomacy
may amount to little more than a distraction from the crisis enveloping his presidency at home.
For the United States’ most reliable friends and most important allies in the region — the Israelis —
however, Mr. Clinton’s conduct in the Gaza Strip today casts an ominous shadow over their
security and the prospects for a real and durable peace.

A Fraud By Any Other Name

That state of affairs is ironic, even surreal, given the day’s carefully choreographed effort to
conjure up the appearance of peace. Yasser Arafat talked of peace incessantly during his address
to the Palestinian National Council and representatives of other organizations (including, among
the audience, known murderers of American citizens). Those present even stood on his command
and raised their arms in what was interpreted — in accordance with the script — by President
Clinton, by the press and even by the Israeli government as, in Mr. Clinton’s words, “fully, finally
and forever” disposing of the thorny problem of the Palestinian Charter.

In fact, this amounts to one of the greatest diplomatic frauds in history.
Without striking one
word, without adopting a single phrase of alternative text, the Palestinians have “reaffirmed”
earlier, equally vacuous declarations that the provisions of their 1964 Covenant that call for the
destruction of Israel have been “revoked.” Since 30 out of the 33 provisions of this Charter
espouse the elimination of the Jewish State and/or attacks on its people, such a step would, if
genuine, seem to necessitate that a new Covenant be drafted and formally adopted to take its
place.

Now, imagine if Hitler’s National Socialist Party had, part way through the Holocaust,
proclaimed
that unspecified sections of Mein Kampf that blamed the Jews for Germany’s troubles
no longer
represented its guiding philosophy. Would people of the Jewish faith or extraction living in
Nazi-controlled Germany have been wise to accept this pronouncement at face value — without
the promulgation of any revised text or statutes, to say nothing of a wholesale redirection of
Hitler’s policies?

Is it reasonable to ask a people who have repeatedly been the victims of state-sponsored
genocide
and who are confronted with much evidence aside from the Covenant that the new Palestinian
state will be equally committed to the destruction of the Jews and their nation, to settle for less
than a clear-cut, formal and unbegrudging rejection of the PLO’s hateful Charter? Obviously not.

Yet, Israel’s American allies insist that much less is needed. And so, we have the spectacle of
President Clinton lending the moral authority of the United States with his presence and his words
to a subterfuge. There was no roll call vote, there were no concrete measures taken to strike
offending passages or to replace them with commitments to peaceful coexistence with Israel.
Worse yet, as the Associated Press reported before the event, “Palestinian negotiator
Hassan
Asfour said, ‘We will raise our hands and stand up and applaud’….Despite the show of
hands, this should not be considered a formal vote, he added.”

The U.S. role in perpetrating this fraud is made no less reprehensible by the fact that the
Israeli
government felt it must accept what the President has legitimated. The unalterable reality,
however, is that irrespective of what Prime Minister Netanyahu chooses to say about today’s
version of Palestinian theater-of-the-absurd, the PLO has not amended — let
alone stricken —
the offensive passages.

This takes on particular import when there is so much evidence that the reason is not
Palestinian sensibilities about being tutored on parliamentary procedures. Rather, it is an
abiding determination on the part of both Arafat’s faction and most of his opponents to
achieve the goal defined by the 1964 Covenant: the destruction of the State of Israel. href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

Encouraging a Palestinian State

Mr. Clinton’s trip to Gaza and the West Bank also is regrettable in that it amounts to the first
state visit by a foreign leader to the incipient Palestinian nation. Despite Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright’s absurd efforts to dismiss the unmistakable symbolic import of the
President’s itinerary, the flames of Palestinian nationalism are being enormously
fanned by:
his arrival and ribbon-cutting ceremony at the newly opened “Gaza International Airport”; the
photo opportunity during his meeting with Arafat in his headquarters under a picture of the city
the Palestinians claim will be their capital, Jerusalem; and his address to the proto-legislature in
the Gaza Strip.

Even Mr. Clinton’s public rhetoric is deliberately inflating Palestinian aspirations. Today, Mr.
Clinton actually announced that “the Palestinian people now have a chance to determine their own
destiny on their own land.” He has complained with approximately the same fervor about Israeli
and Palestinian failures to fulfill their commitments — declaring that “neither has a monopoly on
pain or virtue.”

Such expressions amount to acts of moral equivalence that are not only unjustified
on their
face; they serve further to distance the United States from its most reliable friend and
important ally in the region. Steps like these can only embolden Israel’s enemies.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton is doing a fair amount of damage in her own right. At this writing,
the
First Lady is still scheduled to visit a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, an action in
keeping with — though even more incendiary than — her earlier public call for a Palestinian state.
After all, it will not only serve as a propaganda field-day for those who blame Israel for the
deplorable condition of the residents of such camps throughout the Arab world. It will also
directly insert the United States into the explosive issue of what the Palestinians call the “right of
return of refugees,” the millions of people (many of whom have never set foot in “Palestine”)
who may be interested in populating a new Palestinian state and willing to help liberate what they
see as the rest of its territory, namely Israel.

The Bottom Line

This is not the path of a genuine and durable peace. It may produce “progress,” all right, but
the
movement is in a direction that will not result in security for Israel or serve U.S. interests in the
region. In the words of a preeminent analyst of Middle East affairs, Douglas J. Feith, in the
January 1999 issue of Commentary Magazine: “The Administration’s current policy
— increasing
U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority while winking at its violations of Oslo and its human rights
abuses — simply reinforces the [Palestinian] regime’s most dangerous traits. Down that road lies
further misery for the Palestinians and, for Israel, war.”⁽²⁾

– 30 –

1. See Center Decision Briefs entitled Bibi’s Choice:
Allow The Palestinians To Acquire A Real
— And Threatening — State Or Just A ‘State Of Mind’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_126″>No. 98-D 126, 9 July 1998); and
Clinton Legacy Watch #24: An Odious Ultimatum To Israel ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_78″>No. 98-D 78, 6 May 1998).

2. For additional excerpts from Mr. Feith’s essay, see Center
Decision Brief entitled Clinton,
Stay Home! President’s Ill-Advised Trip To Mideast Will Contribute To
Conflict — Not A
Durable Peace (No. 98-D 198, 11 December
1998).

Clinton Legacy Watch # 32: ‘Wimpy diplomacy’ —
‘I’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday’ for a Signing Ceremony Today

October 13, 1998Frank Gaffney, Jr.

(Washington, D.C.): Here we go again. Another week in the run-up to the 1998 elections.
Another “breakthrough” or two to defuse a pending international crisis — ostensibly
demonstrating the viability of Bill Clinton’s presidency and his successful stewardship of the
United States’ international portfolio.

Cases in Point

The problem is that, as with everything this President does, the deal more or less in hand on
Kosovo and the one expected by week’s end between the Israelis and Palestinians are utter frauds.
The accords they entail will produce naught but the shortest of short-term public
relations
benefits (the signing ceremonies, handshakes, laudatory editorials, etc.) at the expense of
long-term U.S. interests.

Kosovo

Take the case of the Kosovo agreement (if a diplomatic product that is missing as many
critical details as this one is can be called that). As with last February’s agreement brokered with
Saddam Hussein by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, special envoy Richard
Holbrooke’s
latest negotiations with Slobodan Milosevic have made further bloodshed more likely,
not
less.

To be sure, in both cases, the can has been kicked down the road. But the Butchers of
Baghdad
and Belgrade understand that, having negotiated themselves out from under the impending threat
of U.S. and/or multilateral air strikes, it will be much harder for the Clinton Administration to
mobilize international opinion — or even domestic support — for such action the next time around.

In the meantime, the international prestige and perceived durability of these ruthless
dictators is enhanced by the mere act of negotiating with them. (Arguably, Milosevic is
only
a going concern today thanks to the legitimation he received when Holbrooke transformed him
from war criminal to peacemaker as the price for securing at Dayton yet another of the Clinton
team’s pyrrhic diplomatic victories.)⁽¹⁾ Thus emboldened,
they can be expected in due course to
lash out again at innocent civilians (their own or others) and pursue agendas that threaten the
strategic interests of the United States.

The bottom line is that, for seven months, Milosevic has perpetrated and essentially
completed his
“ethnic cleansing” of the Kosovar Albanians. Once again, Holbrooke is intervening in a way that
freezes in place the Serb leader’s gains. Just as the Dayton agreement prevented Croat and
Bosnian Muslim forces from rolling up Milosevic’s troops and proxies in Bosnia, the new
arrangement may protect Serb military and paramilitary units from retaliation.

The introduction of “verifiers” whose safety and effectiveness will not be ensured by NATO
military personnel means that there can be no more confidence in their work than in that of a
hamstrung UNSCOM in Iraq. And the unworkability of this situation — especially when it is
compounded by the inability, as a practical matter, of refugees to return to their homes — almost
certainly means that the Holbrooke deal will not long survive the November elections.

Israel

No less shortsighted is the deal the Clinton Administration is about to foist on Israel.
Here
again, the President’s obsession with securing favorable publicity will be temporarily satisfied by
the hullabaloo surrounding a Wye Plantation deal. But the costs associated with this deal are
extremely high: Thanks to Washington’s euchring of its Israeli allies, the Jewish State
will
surrender territory the Palestinians need to declare a sovereign ministate. Too small to be
viable economically or to satisfy Arafat’s political ambitions, this entity will nonetheless be
sufficiently large to serve as a secure base for terrorism and regional instability, one that
will threaten Jordan and Israel and, in due course, likely precipitate another Mideast
war.

Once again, this transaction is vintage Clinton. The Oslo agreement has not worked out.
Yasir
Arafat remains, like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, a thug whose word cannot be
trusted. He has not complied with his previous agreements. The United States has not only
excused Arafat from doing so; it has actually rewarded him for not
complying by securing
additional territory from Israel for the Palestinian authority. There is, consequently, no reason to
believe Arafat will prove more tractable and responsible in the future.

This is especially likely since the Clinton Administration has repeatedly broken faith with
Israel.
As an inducement to the Netanyahu government to enter into the Hebron agreement, the U.S.
promised two things: First, in a formal note-for-the-record, Mideast Special Envoy
Dennis
Ross identified specific areas in which the PLO has failed to live up to its
obligations under
the Oslo agreement (notably, by failing to eliminate the 30-some provisions of its “National
Charter” that called for the destruction of Israel and jihad against the Jews). This
memorandum
also pledged American assistance in assuring future Palestinian compliance.

Second, in a separate side letter, the United States averred that the timing and extent
of
future troop redeployments and surrender of territory would be up to the Israelis. But
the
agreement that is expected to be completed this week at Wye was essentially dictated by
Washington. Madeleine Albright’s temper tantrums, threats and deadlines ultimately
produced
the intended effect: domestic political pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu to make the
demanded concessions. Once Arafat decided that he would earn President Clinton’s lasting
gratitude by agreeing, prior to the 1998 elections, to accept the thirteen percent of the West Bank
(10% outright, plus 3% in a so-called “demilitarized” nature preserve) the Israelis were forced to
surrender, the outcome was preordained.

Most worrisome of all is the fact that, in the course of these negotiations, the Palestinians
have
perceived an opportunity to drive a wedge between Israel and its most important supporter, the
United States: It is no longer necessary for the PLO to talk to Israel directly; the U.S. will
intervene to extract concessions from Israel. This perception has caused problems in the past and
threatens to prove explosive in the future.

Specifically, a disaster looms on the horizon over the status of Jerusalem.
Intentionally or
otherwise, the Clinton Administration has encouraged the Arabs to believe that it will support
Palestinian efforts to redivide Israel’s historical capital city. It has done so by symbolic actions
(for example, by failing to situate the American embassy there — in violation of U.S. law href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾) and by
its rhetoric about Palestinian statehood (notably, Mrs. Clinton’s clearly orchestrated endorsement
a few months back)⁽³⁾. The cumulative effect has
done nothing to dampen PLO expectations
that East Jerusalem will ultimately serve as the capital of such an entity. Israel cannot live
with such an outcome; if the U.S. aligns itself with the Palestinians on the question, the
chances for war increase measurably, a war into which America will almost certainly be
drawn.

The Bottom Line

Like the cartoon character Wimpy, who was always willing to
promise to “pay you
Tuesday, for a hamburger today,” Bill Clinton is indulging his proclivity for expedient,
near-term self-gratification without regard for the serious long-term costs the Nation will
be obliged to bear as a result. Such fraudulent deal-making has not “contained” Saddam
Hussein or denuclearized North Korea. It will not prevent Slobodan Milosevic from engaging in
further genocide or aggression when he so chooses. It will, however, probably endanger the
United States’ most reliable and important friend in the Middle East — an outcome no amount of
pre-election “bump” in the polls can justify.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Captain Holbrooke Heads for the Lifeboats — but
Fails to Sound the Alarm as the Dayton Ship Goes Down ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_18″>No. 96-D 18, 21 February 1996).

2. See ‘Happy Birthday, Jerusalem’: Congress Affirms
You Are the Unified Capital
Exclusively of Israel (No. 95-D 81, 25
October 1995) and Blessed Be the Peacemakers, for
They Shall Move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_78″>No. 95-D 78, 19 October 1995).

3. See Bibi’s Choice: Allow The Palestinians to
Acquire a Real — and Threatening — State or
Just a ‘State of Mind’ (No. 98-D 126, 9 July 1998).

The Clinton Lies That Count

August 3, 1998Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The emerging conventional wisdom is that President Clinton is going to
stop
lying about his relationship with “That Woman,” Monica Lewinsky. According to the pundits, if
he lies by claiming that he was selflessly doing it just to protect his family, the greatest escape
artist since Houdini may dodge the potentially fatal political bullet now apparently headed his
way.

This remarkable proposition depends not only on the willingness of a forgiving public to look
the
other way at presidential perjury. It also seems predicated upon an oft-heard response to
pollsters: the American people think that, as long as their President doesn’t lie about the
important things — like national security, for example — they aren’t inclined to be sticklers about
his chronic mendacity in personal matters.

Not Just Little Lies

Most Americans must know, however, an elementary fact of human behavior:
People who can’t
bring themselves to tell you the truth about small things generally seem incapable of being
consistently truthful about the big ones.

Whether this is actually a universal reality or not, it certainly seems to apply in Mr. Clinton’s
case.
In an instance perhaps of “it takes one to know one,” Joe Klein — the unmasked “anonymous”
author of Primary Colors, a book about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign
built on lies —
brilliantly described Clinton’s pathology a few years back in a Newsweek cover story
entitled “The
Politics of Promiscuity.”

Particularly revealing is a exchange that reportedly occurred in 1992 when James Carville
complains that Clinton’s playing fast-and-loose with the truth is giving his then-campaign manager
fits. Candidate Clinton’s smirking response that “I haven’t been caught yet” is not simply the
signature of a rake. It is emblematic of a gambler who is addicted to the thrill of staying one step
ahead of the law, the press, the women in his life, his political foes, etc.

The Big Lies Affecting the Nation’s Security

Unfortunately, the big things the President is currently lying about are not just putting his
personal
place in history and the Presidency in harm’s way. Increasingly, his inability to tell the truth is
jeopardizing the national security. Consider a few illustrative examples:

Lying About the Missile Threat: The President has on more than 130
occasions — including
a State of the Union address — told the American people that there are no ballistic missiles
targeted at them. This is either absolutely untrue or a temporary state of affairs that can
change so speedily as to be strategically irrelevant, as the House Republican leadership and the
blue-ribbon Rumsfeld Commission, among others, have pointed out to him.

a national poll

commissioned last week by the Center for
Security Policy, the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation and the
Claremont Institute found that 65% of the American people don’t buy this
presidential line.⁽¹⁾

Just
over one-in-four Americans (29%) could correctly answer that the United
States has no protection against the missiles that they recognize, despite the
President’s misrepresentations, are a real threat.

Lying About Proliferation: The President has proven willing, in a
quintessential Clinton
phrase, to “fudge the facts” about the actual involvement of the Chinese and Russians in
missile technology transfers and other proliferation activities. For instance, in the interest of
clearing the way for the sale of American nuclear reactors to China, he has actually formally
certified in writing that Beijing is behaving itself. And, as Congress sought to punish Russian
entities for helping Iran’s rapidly progressing ballistic missile development program, Mr.
Clinton and his team ran interference for Moscow, vetoing the sanctions legislation approved
by overwhelming majorities in both houses. (Their excuses rang particularly hollow after the
Kremlin finally got around to sanctioning seven of the Russian firms involved.)

Lying About His Concern for the U.S. Military: Last September,
President Clinton told the
American military that “There is a line that I simply cannot cross, and that line is the safety and
security of our men and women in uniform.” With these words, he rejected the intense
pressure he was then under to sign an international ban on anti-personnel landmines. He
seemed to recognize that such a ban would clearly have jeopardized not only the safety of the
armed forces but also potentially impaired their ability to prevail on future battlefields.

Lying About His Treatment of Israel: Mr. Clinton recently declared that
he had not given
Israel a deadline to reach agreement on the surrender of additional territory to Yasser Arafat, a
man he routinely describes and treats as a reliable partner for Middle East peace. These are
lies with potentially profound implications for long-term U.S. interests in the region and the
security of this nation’s most important ally there.

The Bottom Line

This is an illustrative — though hardly exhaustive — litany of Presidential mendaciousness
about
matters that qualify, by any reasonable definition, as “big” things. It would be vastly more
important for Mr. Clinton to issue “mea culpas” about these sorts of lies, than about his
relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. At the very least, by so doing he might allow some
corrective
actions to be taken — and thus avoid, perhaps, the sort of lasting damage that usually
comes of lying.

– 30 –

1. For a fuller treatment of the results of this poll, see the Center’s
website at www.security-policy.org