Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (20 page)

To prove his case, Clinton cited the example of Brazil, where nearly every AIDS patient was afforded access to “life-saving generic drugs manufactured in that country.” The Brazilian experiment already had saved more than $400 million in annual hospitalization expenses, rapidly reduced death rates from AIDS and related diseases, and cut new infection rates by half.

This success can be replicated across the globe. To promote the development of AIDS treatment programs in places where they are most needed, my foundation has begun signing agreements with developing nations, including Rwanda, Mozambique and the 15 states in the Caribbean Community. We are putting teams of expert volunteers in these countries to help governments and health-care institutions develop strategies to establish large-scale testing and treatment programs for their citizens.

These are small, grass-roots efforts. But if they succeed, they will save many lives and provide a model to the rest of the world. And the International AIDS Trust, which I lead with Nelson Mandela, is helping to mobilize the resources and leadership needed to focus on treatment and wage a real war on AIDS.

It would be a war of attrition, stretching much longer and reaching much further than any military campaign, requiring strange new alliances and arcane management strategies—and to wage it, Clinton would put his personal reputation on the line in dozens of countries, rich and poor.

CHAPTER SIX

With his reputation gradually recovering from the pardons controversy, Clinton felt increasingly drawn back into the arena of politics and diplomacy. He felt the pull of politics despite conventional strictures on ex-presidents, who were still expected to remain silent on such matters. But for him, the urge to engage, to speak out, and to intervene posed a special problem: the inevitable tension between his accustomed role in politics and his new vocation in philanthropy.

During the final weeks of February 2003, while he pondered how he would stand up and finance his new HIV/AIDS initiative—as well as the approaching deadline for his $15 million memoir—an urgent request arrived in Harlem from the office of the British prime minister. Rather suddenly, Tony Blair’s staff asked the former president to fly over for a late winter weekend at Chequers, the magnificent sixteenth-century country residence used by the prime minister and his family.

It was not a social invitation. Blair wanted Clinton to come over from New York soon, and their offices quickly agreed that the visit would take place over the weekend of March 8.

As president, Clinton had stayed with Tony and Cherie Blair at Chequers more than once, including an official visit during his last weeks in the White House. He was there on the December night when Al Gore conceded the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, issuing a statement from the baronial estate in Buckinghamshire that urged Americans to accept the result of the Supreme Court’s decision favoring Bush without further rancor.

Now with Clinton out of office, this surprising summons from the British leader carried more than a hint of stress, coming at a moment when Blair faced what loomed as his most fateful decision. In the struggle between Washington and Europe over war in Iraq—with London in the middle—which side would he choose?

While Blair would strive to present himself as a resolute warrior,
Clinton realized that his friend actually hoped to avoid that difficult choice, if at all possible. Widely caricatured in Europe by then as “Bush’s poodle,” a sobriquet that would endure, Blair felt much less enthusiasm for the prospect of war than he would later profess, or so Clinton believed. Under intense and unrelenting pressure from the Bush White House to join its crusade against Saddam Hussein, the British leader desperately wished to maintain the traditional “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom, and yet to do so without alienating his neighbors in Europe, where many politicians and most citizens firmly opposed the American drive to war.

To finesse this worsening conflict, the prime minister felt he needed advice from Clinton—a sympathetic friend, a political mentor, and a statesman whose skillful maneuvering across partisan and ideological frontiers Blair had long admired. And in fact, he wanted more than advice.

By the weekend when Clinton arrived at Chequers, Blair had almost played out his hand. The Bush White House counted him as its principal ally, sincere if not absolutely reliable due to antiwar sentiment among the British public, in Parliament, and among the ranks of his own Labour Party ministers. The trajectory toward war had been clear for many months, in communications between the two nations’ intelligence and defense bureaucracies as well as private conversations between president and prime minister.

Already the breach between the United States and Europe had been fully exposed at the United Nations Security Council, where France and Germany were leading international opposition to any endorsement of the threatened U.S. invasion. Positions on both sides were hardening, even as U.N. weapons inspection teams—led by the Swedish diplomat Hans Blix—raced to complete the difficult, painstaking process of tracking down scientists, sites, warehouses, and laboratories for any trace of the chemical and biological weapons that Saddam had certainly once possessed.

Yet somehow Blair still believed he might be able to forge a compromise uniting the Europeans, the U.S., and the rest of the Security Council members—including Mexico, Chile, China, Russia, and several Francophone West African countries—around another resolution. The new resolution would set a deadline for Blix to complete the in
spections and report his group’s findings. If Saddam interfered with inspections or refused to disarm, the new resolution would authorize military action.

While Blair and Clinton had met and discussed what to do about Iraq on at least two previous occasions, the March 8 visit to Chequers marked the beginning of the endgame.

“Look, our only chance to work this out, short of war, is to try and get an extension of the U.N. resolution with a deadline,” the prime minister told him. Speaking of Bush, Blair speculated hopefully, “I think that George will take what Blix says he needs. I think he’ll take three weeks.” In exchange for a resolution endorsing military action should Saddam curtail the inspections, he thought Bush might agree to a final deadline set by Blix for his inspectors to report. The earliest possible completion date, according to Blix, was three weeks beyond the vague deadline in late March when Pentagon war planners anticipated invading Iraq.

What the U.S. president might be willing to accept, however, would matter very little unless Blair could recruit other Security Council members to support a new resolution. In that endeavor, he believed that Clinton’s powers of persuasion and personal relationships might make a difference. Unless Clinton could bring over the Mexicans and the Chileans, Blair’s gambit was dead.

Listening to his friend’s argument, Clinton was inclined to agree—and to help, even in the face of political risk.

The etiquette of the American presidency is exceedingly clear on the question of former chief executives meddling in policy after they leave office—especially concerning foreign affairs, war, and diplomacy: They aren’t supposed to do that. Whatever any of them might wish to say about a successor’s decisions, they should say only to the president, and only when asked.

Certainly that was the way most former presidents had interpreted the unwritten rules, aside from Theodore Roosevelt, who had actually turned around and run for president in 1912 against his own chosen successor and close friend, William Howard Taft. Even T.R. had often refused public comment about Taft’s presidency on many occasions, however, before breaking with him completely. In the decades since, most ex-presidents had faded into the background, saying little or
nothing publicly that might embarrass the newest member of their fraternity.

Jimmy Carter was the contemporary exception. He rarely hesitated to create difficulties for any of his successors as a matter of principle, and was consequently disliked by all of them, despite his highly successful, quietly effective work to eradicate tropical diseases and promote democratic reform in the developing world.

Constrained by the conventions of the American presidency, and seeking to cultivate bipartisan credibility as a philanthropic leader, Clinton had usually demurred from criticizing George W. Bush. He was well aware that Bush’s father—his own predecessor whom he had defeated in a bitter election—had never criticized him, although there had been many tempting opportunities. But well before the end of 2002 Clinton began to chafe against those limits.

While campaigning for his party’s doomed congressional and senatorial candidates that fall, Clinton had felt outraged by commercials and speeches questioning the patriotism of the same Democrats who had staunchly supported Bush after 9/11—in approving war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, in the swift approval of national security legislation such as the draconian Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, and, in general, refraining from any wartime criticism of the commander-in-chief.

Many of those Democrats, including his wife Hillary, the junior senator from New York, had voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Saddam Hussein in October 2002, despite strong misgivings about Bush’s intentions. Their reward was a Republican campaign—overseen by White House political boss Karl Rove—deriding Democrats as weak, fearful, unfit to fight terrorism.

Among the incidents that most outraged Clinton was a series of attack ads in the Georgia Senate race, where a Republican named Saxby Chambliss unseated Senator Max Cleland, the former secretary of veterans affairs in the Carter administration. Decorated with a Silver Star for gallantry in the battle of Khe Sanh, Cleland had later lost both legs and one arm in Vietnam when he picked up a grenade dropped by another soldier. He had bravely reclaimed his life, going on to serve in government, enter politics in his home state, and win election to the Senate in 1996 during Clinton’s reelection campaign.

By contrast, Chambliss was a “chicken-hawk” who had avoided the war with various draft deferments. But the three-term congressman nevertheless ran ads charging that Cleland lacked “the courage to lead” against the nation’s foes, with stark photos of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. When questioned about this accusation, Chambliss cited Cleland’s vote against a Republican attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from federal employees in the new Department of Homeland Security. The demagogic attacks were effective—and despite Clinton’s strenuous efforts on his behalf, Cleland was ousted.

The smashing defeat suffered by the Democrats in the fall of 2002 had left Clinton appalled, frustrated, and angry, not only with the Republicans, but with his own hapless party. During that campaign and in the months that followed, he had started to speak out more forthrightly against Bush’s domestic policies, especially on taxation and the environment. But as the deadline for the Iraq invasion approached, he had said nothing critical about administration policy. What comments he had offered were encouraging, as when he told CNN anchor Larry King that he thought Bush was doing “the right thing” to push for Iraq’s disarmament.

But privately, neither of the Clintons was so sure. In later years, Hillary’s Iraq vote would return to haunt her again and again, eventually forcing her to admit that she had made “a mistake, plain and simple.” But according to Clinton, she had been reluctant to support Bush’s authorization to use military force—and he had advised her to vote “yea.”

“I just don’t trust Bush,” her husband recalled her complaining privately in the days before the vote. “He’s not being serious about these inspections. Maybe I should just vote no.”

Clinton shared her concern about Bush’s sincerity in promising to respect the findings of the U.N. weapons inspectors. While he, too, suspected that the administration meant to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam, regardless of the inspection results, he also worried about the risks of dangerous weapons—possibly including chemical and biological toxins—under the control of the Iraqi dictator. Nobody was certain what might remain in his hidden arsenal.

“But Hillary,” he recalled replying, “we don’t want to leave Saddam with that stuff”—meaning chemical and biological weapons—“if he’s got it. He will never use it, but he might transfer it to the people we’re worried about”—meaning terrorist enemies such as al Qaeda.

Only the threat of military force would open Iraq up to the inspectors, whose expulsion by the Iraqi government in 1998 had provoked Clinton to order an extensive U.S. bombing campaign against identified weapons storage facilities. He believed those raids had destroyed the vast bulk of Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons left over from his country’s horrific war against Iran, but perhaps not all. He agreed with Blix, whose “attitude was if [Saddam] doesn’t think there are any [military] consequences, he’ll lie, cheat, steal.” And Clinton had undertaken that bombing campaign without explicit permission from the Security Council, relying legally on previous resolutions requiring Iraq to disarm.

Owing to Clinton’s doubts that war would only be “a last resort,” as promised by Bush—and despite his utter disdain for “the neocon theories,” which he regarded as “a bunch of crap”—he hoped that completion of the weapons inspections might ultimately prevent war. “If they were completed, and Blix gave a clean bill of health, it would be hard as hell for [Bush] to go to war.”

Indeed, although in 1998 he had endorsed “regime change” in Iraq as U.S. policy, Clinton didn’t believe that war could be justified five years later unless Saddam “was hoarding stuff that could be used.” He didn’t believe that “America had the resources to go after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, or just across the border in Pakistan, and . . . do what we needed to do, replacing the Taliban . . . when the whole damn world supported what we were doing back then in Afghanistan, and open a second front in Iraq. That just didn’t make any sense to me.”