Half a cheer for Bill - Bill Clinton's decision to attack Iraq's intelligence headquarters - Editorial

National Review, July 19, 1993

THE JUNE 26 retaliatory attack on Iraq's intelligence headquarters was a necessary step, but the Clinton Administration's explanations only subtract from its impressiveness.

Certainly it was essential to act on the evidence of Iraqi involvement in the plot to murder former President Bush in Kuwait. It was healthy that a President who was a disciple of George McGovern, and whose performance hitherto had reduced U.S. credibility to an all-time low, showed that he was capable of military action. The target was well selected and the attack well executed. It was also important that an Administration that often seemed to worship the United Nations acted alone this time, defending American honor and interests without seeking permission from Turtle Bay.

What was unsettling, however, was that U.S. officials seemed inordinately proud of the restraints they observed--such as attacking at night when no one would be in the building. This is no way to deter a terrorist thug. But Democrats still have a hang-up about the use of force. They cannot get over their Vietnam-era yearning to do it on the cheap--as if using "only a little bit" of force takes the moral curse off it. This is almost always a mistake.

The Administration seems also to have been immobilized by a constipated interpretation of international law. "Proportionality" is indeed a venerable legal principle. The true test of policy in this case, however, was: Did it do whatever was necessary to deter future challenges to us? This is a more demanding criterion. We have enough respect for international law to think that if an interpretation of it leads to a ridiculous result, it must be the wrong interpretation. We do not see how respect for the rule of law is vindicated by any measures that fail to convince Saddam Hussein to keep his head down. Mr. Clinton's airstrike was better than nothing, but his highly advertised restraint only adds to the likelihood that he will be tested again.

Of course there is a pattern here. The Clinton climb-down over Bosnia has left a trail of disillusionment--the contempt of our European allies and bitter complaints from Moslems that we seem uninterested in protecting the rights of Moslems who lack oil wells. In Yugoslavia, Mr. Clinton flinched, offering a limited plan for tactical airstrikes and then backing away both from this and from his campaign promise to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnians. His moral impulse, military judgment, and strategic sense all seemed to be in a state of confusion.

In North Korea the Administration is shockingly passive in the face of Kim Il-sung's nuclear-weapons program. In this case our strategic interest is overwhelming: Japan's confidence in our nuclear guarantee is at stake. All we have seen, however, is Warren Christopher's naive belief that all problems yield to patient negotiation. Thus, we have been sucked into empty meetings at the UN, frustrating talks at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and conversations with low-level North Korean diplomats that do absolutely nothing to slow down North Korea's drive to complete its nuclear-weapons program. In fact the passage of time works ominously against us. If you really believe that during all this diplomacy Kim Il-sung has told his scientists to hold up on their work, then there's a job waiting for you in the Christopher State Department.

The drastic slashes in our defense budget--twice what Mr. Clinton spoke of in his campaign--only reinforce the growing perception of U.S. impotence. Defense Secretary Les Aspin had come up with a cockamamie global strategy--"win-hold-win"--which would have had us try to win quickly if challenged by some Third World thug, while holding on by our fingernails if challenged somewhere else at the same time, until we could shift forces back and forth between the two fronts. Mr. Aspin backed off from this Rube Goldberg doctrine after it met with general ridicule, but the Administration has not backed off from the drastic cuts in defense that will leave us floundering in just that way.

This incoherence is aggravated by the seductions of humanitarianism. In both Haiti and Somalia the Administration seems positively eager to use U.S. forces to serve some vision of a noble end, with little or no regard to any strategic interest. Mr. Clinton during his campaign, and many liberals in their disquisitions over the last few years, have expressed the desire to use our power for a host of new tasks, from hurricane relief to delivering food. (In Haiti, they imagine they are restoring democracy in the person of the murderer-priest Aristide.) Humanitarian interventionism is a form of escapism, an evasion of the real strategic challenges that face us. As NR has said before, it is an illusion to think we can maintain international peace and American leadership while at the same time cutting back our power and evading strategic realities. It's voodoo national-security policy.