Last night Bill Clinton was at the top of Tom Brokaw's nightly news, feted as if he were still a sitting president.
I was hoping Brokaw might ask some hard questions of the former president, who was the steward for America's national security during the past eight years. Other than a softball question about why had not done more to get bin Laden, nothing of substance came from Brokaw.
Since the attack of Sept. 11, major media personalities, figures including Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Mark Shields, Katie Couric, Howard Fineman, Alan Greenspan's wife Andrea Mitchell, and many others have sought to attack our sitting president in a crisis situation for, among other things, his communication skills, his decision not to immediately return to Washington, and his lack of involvement in the "peace process."
Still, despite all of the hours of coverage I have watched on the major networks, I have not heard one media personality or talking head even question the handling of America's national security by Bill Clinton. There is good reason to discuss Clinton's role in all of this. Only by knowing what went wrong can we fix the problems and prepare for the future.
NewsMax first broke the story about Clinton's activities at the CIA. Now that story about the CIA's failure to recruit spies in these terrorist networks has been talked about by many.
Still, Clinton's role in creating the policy that led to such disaster is never mentioned by the major media. Even conservative talking heads don't mention Clinton. Why?
Because many of these pundits have read the tea leaves and know they just might not be invited back by TV producers if they criticize the sacred cow, Bill Clinton, and, by association, his wife. It's OK for major media to attack Bush, but no one in the media seems willing to question Clinton's performance before and after the tragedy.
Clinton has been behaving as he always has: with no class. How could he go down to ground zero area in Lower Manhattan before the sitting president? It was a clear attempt to upstage President Bush, and everyone knew it. (I might note, and this never made the news either, that many of the rescue workers, police and firemen, gave Clinton, and later his wife, the cold shoulder and didn't shake their hands. Bush, however, was wildly received.) It has been protocol in a time of crisis for former presidents to give quiet counsel to the current president, but never to grandstand. Clinton even used the occasion of the National Prayer Service to grandstand, as he politicked on the steps of the cathedral for almost a quarter of an hour. Clinton obviously has little use for appropriate protocol.
If he wants to put himself so much in the limelight, why, then, should he also be shielded by the major media from scrutiny and criticism?
Why can't the media ask him why there was never any retaliation after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? If the bombing then had fully succeeded, it would have caused even more deaths than the present catastrophe.
Why did the administration continue to coddle terrorist nations like Syria after numerous bombings on U.S. facilities during the past eight years? Why was the Clinton administration so quiet during Iran's buildup of its nuclear weapons program? Why did we continue to aid Russia while it gave technological expertise to the Iranians to build these weapons?
Most importantly, why, after eight years of the Clinton administration, is Saddam's military almost completely rebuilt? Remember, former President Bush left Saddam flattened when Clinton assumed the presidency.
But today, Saddam has an estimated 5,000 tanks and the same number of troops as he did before the invasion of Kuwait.
Even worse, in 1998 Clinton withdrew U.S. demands that Saddam allow U.N. inspectors to monitor his weapons programs. Richard Butler, the former head of the U.N. program, has no doubt that Saddam’s program to build nuclear, chemical and biological weapons has been expedited because of Clinton policies.
At the same time the U.S. pulled its demand for monitors, the Clinton administration was giving the green light at the U.N. for Iraq to begin selling oil on the world market. Billions have now poured into Iraq – giving that country the type of financial resources it would need to wage war, including one of global terror against the U.S.
For some reason the liberal media, so quick to assign blame to President Bush, do not want look to the recent past and to Clinton's appeasement of the nations that sponsor terrorism. As we begin this war, we should look at how Winston Churchill and the British people handled the calamity that befell them in 1940.
Upon assuming the prime ministership, Churchill had appeaser Neville Chamberlain humiliated and assigned to the back benches.
To his dying, Winston Churchill called World War II the "unnecessary war."
He didn't do it for political reasons, such as scoring points in opinion polls. He never stopped explaining the cause of that horrific war and assigning blame and responsibility to those leaders responsible. Churchill said the war was caused by appeasement. He named the guilty parties.
He did this for good reason. Unless we understood why the war had happened, we would be doomed to repeat it.
