At the White House, we held hurried meetings as we watched with worry the growth of terrorism. We polled and speculated about its possible impact on President Clinton's re-election only a few months later.
Some of the president's staff and his consultants pressed the case for aggressive action to contain terror at home and attack it abroad. But at the center of the storm, Bill Clinton sat with an unusual imperturbability. Even as he fretted about whether to sign the welfare reform act and brooded about the FBI file, Paula Jones and Whitewater scandals, he seemed curiously uninvolved in the battle against terror.
Advised that his place in history rested on eliminating the deficit, making welfare reform work, and smashing the international network of terrorists militarily and economically, he remained unusually passive. Around him, his foreign-policy advisers--particularly former trade lawyer Sandy Berger, then serving as deputy national security adviser--seemed to work overtime at opposing tough measures against terror.
When Sen. Alfonse D'Amato pushed through legislation that sought to cripple the Iranian funding of terrorism by mandating U.S. retaliation against foreign or American companies that aided its oil industry, Mr. Berger advised a veto unless the bill were amended to allow the president to waive the sanctions. When the bill passed--with the waiver--Mr. Berger successfully blocked the implementation of sanctions in virtually every case. When Mr. Clinton was advised to pass a law requiring that driver's licenses for aliens expire when their visas do (so that a routine traffic stop could trigger the deportation process), Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes and White House adviser George Stephanopoulos worked hard to kill the idea. They derided the proposal, which called for the interface of FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service data about illegal aliens, visa expirations and terrorist watch lists with state motor vehicle records, as racial profiling and warned that it might alienate Mr. Clinton's political base. Had the idea been adopted, suicide bomber Mohamed Atta would have been subject to deportation when he was stopped for driving without a license, three months before Sept. 11, 2001.
President Clinton refused to adopt proposals that he establish a "president's list" of seemingly charitable groups that were really fund-raising fronts for terrorists, to warn Americans to stay away. Despite evidence from a 1993 FBI wiretap that the Homeland Foundation was raising money for the terrorist group Hamas, Mr. Clinton did not seize its assets, and the group functioned until President Bush closed it down.
Despite staff and consultant recommendations that he require baggage X-ray screening, federalization of air security checkpoints, and restoration of air marshals to commercial flights, Mr. Clinton did nothing to implement any of these proposals. Vice President Al Gore also failed to embrace them when his Commission on Air Safety made its recommendations in 1997. It required Sept. 11 to get these common-sense initiatives adopted.
After the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, President Clinton never visited the site and only alluded to it once in his regular Saturday radio address right after the bombing. Visiting New Jersey shortly after the attack, he urged Americans not to "overreact."
After the 1993 bombing--the first attack by foreign terrorists on U.S. soil--Mr. Clinton never met privately with the head of the CIA for the ensuing two years! Because of this lack of presidential focus, the investigation proceeded so slowly that we did not know of Osama bin Laden's involvement until 1996. As a result, the U.S. turned down Sudan's offer to give us the terrorist mastermind on a silver platter because we said that we lacked evidence on which to hold him.
Even when the Saudis stonewalled our investigation of the Riyadh bombing and handicapped the FBI by beheading those it suspected of involvement without permitting their interrogation, Mr. Clinton never criticized the kingdom publicly or, in my presence, privately.
When advisers proposed an oil embargo against Iran, the president did nothing, despite evidence that the Riyadh bombers had Iranian backing. At the time, Iran's daily oil production of three million barrels could have been offset by an expected increase of 1.5 million barrels in world-wide production (which proved conservative). In addition, the Saudis repeatedly and publicly indicated their commitment to "price stability," signaling their willingness to increase production to help fill the shortfall and avoid a price runup.
Republicans deserve their share of the blame as well. After the Oklahoma City attack, President Clinton made an eminently sensible, if somewhat limited, set of recommendations to the GOP-dominated Congress. But, because the Oklahoma City terrorists were right-wing extremists, Republicans looked askance at reasonable ideas like permitting roving wiretaps on terror suspects--subsequently adopted when Mr. Bush proposed it--and attaching tagents to identify the origin of explosives. The real question, however, is why Mr. Clinton was so tentative in the war on terror. Everything else seemed to come first. He wouldn't toughen immigration enforcement because he feared a backlash from his political base. He waived sanctions against companies doing business with Iran because he worried about European reaction. There was no effort to cut off the flow of money to terror fronts because Janet Reno raised civil libertarian concerns. (Mr. Clinton did freeze the Hamas assets, but since they didn't maintain accounts in their own name, it netted no money.)
Bill Clinton revealed himself as a man of the 20th century while Mr. Bush has understood that Sept. 11, 2001, marked the beginning of a new era. In Bill Clinton's epoch, terror was primarily a criminal justice problem which must not be allowed to get in the way of the "real" foreign-policy issues--relations with Russia and China and the dynamics of the Western alliance. Indeed, if Mr. Clinton had any personal stamp on foreign policy, it was the subordination of military and security issues to economic concerns.
Terrorists fit into the scheme about the same way drug traffickers did--they were deplored, to be sure, and, where possible without undue inconvenience or loss of life, even attacked. But they hardly occupied center stage in our foreign policy.
Now, we all know better.
