The War on Dissent: The leadership front

I often thought that the cause of so much of the viciousness of the attacks on Bill Clinton during his presidency was not merely the desire to bring him down, but to make an example out of him, a la Ann Coulter. The larger purpose being to intimidate not merely the president but anyone who happened to be on his side.

Well, Clinton isn’t such a convenient target anymore. So naturally the guns have been turning toward whoever happens to be in what vestiges remain of the Democratic leadership -- particularly Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Spinsanity has already done a marvelous job of compiling much of the preceding attacks on Daschle, particularly Rush Limbaugh's bizarre rant equating Daschle with Satan.

Now the attacks are growing even more vicious, especially as dissent about Bush's war in Iraq simmers along. And once again, Daschle is only being used as an example of what happens to war dissenters.

First, Daschle said what needed to be said about Bush's dirty little war:

"I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war. Saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that was so critical for our country."

Then came the Republican onslaught. Uggabugga has done a nice job of compiling the nastiness of these attacks, including Marc "Irony Impaired" Racicot, who called it "divisive and brazen political posturing."

More than a few people have already pointed out that Daschle, at least, is a combat veteran who was decorated for his service. Most of his critics had "other priorities" when it came time to serve.

But even more significant is a point made recently by E.J. Dionne in his Washington Post column, A Double Standard on Dissent. Dionne points out that Republicans eager to silence Daschle's reasonable points about Bush's diplomatic failures applied a different standard when President Clinton launched his 1999 air campaign in Kosovo:

"I don't think we should be bombing in the Balkans," said Rep. Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican. "I don't think NATO should be destroyed because we changed its mission to a humanitarian one." His colleague Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-Calif.) accused Clinton of pursuing "the most inept foreign policy in the history of the United States."

For what it's worth, at the time, I criticized both parties for overly personalizing the Kosovo debate around Clinton. But the fact is that DeLay, Cunningham and the other critics were, like Daschle, simply exercising their right -- as Americans and as members of Congress -- to differ with the commander in chief.

Defenders of Daschle have focused on the Kosovo debate, but almost all of Clinton's military decisions came under withering Republican criticism. That's especially true of those he took in the middle of his sex scandal. Note, for example, this Republican reaction to Clinton's missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan against al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

"I just hope and pray that the decision that was made was made on the basis of sound judgment and made for the right reasons, and not made because it was necessary to save the president's job," said Dan Coats, then a senator from Indiana and now President Bush's ambassador to Germany. "Why now? Bin Laden has been known to be a terrorist for a long time. Why did this happen?"

This is an important point, because this hypocrisy demonstrates with crystal clarity just how the Republicans' manipulation of the "patriotism" issue for their own convenience has been detrimental to the American public as a whole.

For more on this, turn to The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon. Benjamin and Simon are former counterterror officials with the National Security Council, incredibly well-informed insiders who lay out in very clear terms the road leading to the events of Sept. 11.

According to them, the turning point when al-Qaeda became America's greatest enemy was not on Sept. 11, 2001, but rather on Aug. 20, 1998 -- the day President Clinton launched missile strikes against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and the Sudan, the latter being a pharmaceutical plant at al-Shifa that was being used to develop chemical weapons. First, there's this, on pp. 260-261:

For a brief moment, the operation appeared to be a qualified success. Al-Shifa was destroyed. Six terrorist camps were hit and about sixty people were killed, many of them Pakistani militants training for action in Kashmir. The Tomahawks missed bin Laden and the other senior al-Qaeda leaders by a couple of hours. This in itself was not a great surprise: no one involved has any illusions about the chances of hitting the target at exactly the right time. The White House recognized that the strike would not stop any attacks that were in the pipeline, but it might forestall the initiation of new operations as the organization's leaders went to ground.

The months that followed, however, were a nightmare. The press picked apart the administration's case for striking al-Shifa, and controversy erupted over whether Clinton was trying to "wag the dog," that is, distract the public from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Washington Times -- the capital's unabashed right-wing newspaper, which consistently has the best sources in the intelligence world and the least compunction about leaking -- ran a story mentioning that bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." Bin Laden stopped using the satellite phone instantly. The al-Qaeda leader was not eager to court the fate of Djokar Dudayev, the Chechen insurgent leader who was killed by a Russian air defense suppression missile that homed in on its target using his satellite phone signal. When bin Laden stopped using the phone and let his aides do the calling, the United States lost its best chance to find him.

Benjamin and Simon spend most of the next hundred pages or so detailing the very sound reasons for the al-Shifa strikes. For anyone serious about understanding how Sept. 11 happened, and the nature of the threat we now face, I strongly recommend reading the entirety of this book. But these passages are particularly important.

They return to the issue of the 'Wag the Dog' charges on pages 357-359:

In its coverage of al-Shifa, though, most of the media did embrace one gigantic inference: by attacking a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, it was said, President Bill Clinton was attempting to "wag the dog," to distract the American public from a sex scandal just as war against Albania was used for the same purpose in the eponymous Robert De Niro-Dustin Hoffman move released eight months earlier. Clinton's grand-jury appearance regarding his relationship with Monica Lewinsky occurred three days before the August 20 attack. That event and the universal conviction that life was imitating art swept all considerations of American security aside on the radio and network television and in the daily papers. Within forty-eight hours of the missile attacks, NBC News had broadcast clips from the movie six times, and every other network ran the footage repeatedly as well.

On CNN's Crossfire, the satirist Mark Russell led Pat Buchanan and Bill Press in singing:

If a woman gives you trouble or maybe two or three, and your explanations put the public in a fog, no problem, pick that red phone up, it's an emergency, and go to war. It's been done before. It's "Wag the Dog."

"Wag the Dog." "Wag the Dog." Go to war, it's been done before, it's "Wag the Dog."

Well, no one will complain with a Hitler like Hussein, and everyone will understand your war. An Afghanistan distraction from your problems and your pain, namely, Monica and Paula and God knows how many more.

"Wag the Dog."

The bloodshed in East Africa had been eclipsed by a carnival.

That Clinton would be accused of trying to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal surprised no one in the policy loop. When the Principals met in the White House Situation Room to approve the operation, Secretary of Defense William Cohen said that the President was going to be criticized for trying to change the subject from the ongoing scandal. Others in the room were somewhat surprised that Cohen felt this needed to be spelled out, and no one commented on the remark. Later, when Clinton was briefed on the operation in the Cabinet Room, one adviser said that there were certain to be allegations that he was trying to distract the country. "If I have to take more criticism for this, I will," he replied.

Just how much Clinton ultimately had to take was incredible, not only because of the implicit disregard for the bloodshed in East Africa -- Exhibit A demonstrating that the United States was in a new game with new rules -- but also because of the absurdity of the idea that any President, and especially one with such a famously acute political sensibility, would actually think he could get away with wagging the dog. In Congress, however, some believed Clinton was brazen enough to try it. Senator Arlen Specter, the moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, declared, "The President was considering doing something presidential to try to focus attention away from -- his own personal problems." Senator Daniel Coats of Indiana was less restrained: accusing Mr. Clinton of "lies and deceit and manipulations and deceptions," Coats said that the President's record "raises into doubt everything he does and everything he says, and maybe even everything he doesn't do and doesn't say." Throughout this period and the remainder of the Clinton presidency, it is worth noting, no member of Congress ever called the national security adviser to discuss the rising problem of al-Qaeda. [Emphasis mine]

Of course, as Benjamin and Simon go on to explore further, the press particularly had a field day with the 'Wag the Dog' line. I was working on the news desk at MSNBC at the time and couldn't have counted the number of times I heard the phrase, not just on our cable outlet's natterfests but especially at Fox, with a healthy helping from CNN too. Meanwhile, of course, the Limbaugh and Free Republic brigades led the charge among the True Believers, along with (naturally) the Washington Times.

The most significant point about this is the way the nation's preoccupation with the president's sex life played a role in bringing about the events of Sept. 11. It seems evident that the extent to which Clinton's initiative against bin Laden was undercut both at home and abroad by the massive 'Wag the Dog' allegations helped persuade al-Qaeda's leadership that America was vulnerable to a serious terrorist attack.

More to the point: At the very time when the press should have been raising public awareness of the terrorist threat, and educating the public on the broader implications of terrorism in an open society, it was instead spending night and day focused on blue dresses and blow jobs. No wonder we appeared to be such low-hanging fruit for al-Qaeda.

Of course, no one has yet conducted a serious examination of the role played by the media, and its preceding decade of crass irresponsibility, in bringing about 9/11. Given the press' recent record of failure in taking its job seriously, I'm not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, one wonders just how many of those same members of Congress who undercut Clinton's actions are faring when it comes to handling dissent from Bush's Iraq plans.

Just to take the two examples provided by Benjamin and Simon … from a recent Washington Post story, there's this snippet from Arlen Specter:

The president has enjoyed wide, though not exceptionally deep, support for his Iraq policy among most lawmakers and the American public. He has benefited, at least from a public relations perspective, from Congress's reluctance to renew House and Senate debates over the wisdom of going to war amid mounting international opposition.

"We think the president has the strongest hand" in international affairs "if we don't voice doubts," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

As for Dan Coats -- who was unceremoniously dumped from the Senate in 1998 -- he is now the American ambassador to Germany. His success in that role should be self-evident -- as is his position regarding dissent from Bush's war plans. [From a recent speech by Coats: "Unfortunately, on the issue of Iraq, we have recently experienced a breach in the German-American relationship. The strain as a result of the recent German election was damaging to our relationship, and no one should underestimate that damage, and its consequences. Just last week, during his visit to Berlin for meetings with German law enforcement officials, Congressman James Sensenbrenner noted that, 'The burden is on Germany to restore the trust lost as a result of the election campaign.' That sums up the current view in Washington pretty well."]

It might be similarly instructive to go down the list of all these Republicans busy bashing Daschle to see where they stood regarding the attacks on al-Shifa.