Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (61 page)

Dole’s poor showing, moreover, did not greatly harm Republican candidates for Congress. Clinton had campaigned mainly for himself and had devoted little attention to the exertions of other Democrats. Overall, the election revealed that the two parties continued to be very competitive. The GOP lost four seats in the House but retained control there, 226 to 207. It gained three seats in the Senate, thereby fashioning a margin of 55 to 45 in the upper chamber. Though Republicans were a little less feisty after the election than they had been following their extraordinary sweep in 1994, they were surely angry about losing to Slick Willie. In January 1997, they returned to the Hill ready and eager to engage in four more years of partisan combat.

F
OR THE MOST PART
, conservative Republicans dominated Congress after 1996. Recognizing the odds, Clinton refrained from calling for large initiatives. In 1997, he nonetheless managed to get modest proposals enacted. Congress restored to legal, non-citizen immigrants some of the benefits they had lost in the welfare act of 1996, and it maintained support of the EITC program, which helped many among the working poor. It approved measures to help the health care of poor children and to provide tax credits for higher education. The latter was welcomed by middle-class families beset by escalating tuition costs.

Congress also readily enacted the president’s proposal to lower the capital gains tax rate from 25 to 20 percent. Business leaders and investors hailed this reduction, which they said contributed to the ongoing economic boom. The arrival, at last, in fiscal 1998 of federal government budget surpluses stimulated especially enthusiastic applause. Clinton, admirers said, continued to be politically adept at sustaining domestic social programs, and at economic management in general. The surge since 1994 of the economy especially helped to elevate his job approval ratings, which soared above 70 percent in early 1998. These ratings remained high—generally over 60 percent—for the remainder of his term in office.
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The president made a concerted effort to reinforce his credentials as an advocate of environmentalism—a domain of policy that Gore, his vice president, had staked out as a special concern. During his presidency he placed more land in the lower forty-eight states under federal protection than had any other twentieth-century president.
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In 1997, he signed the so-called Kyoto Protocol, which called on the United States and other developed countries collectively by 2012 to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases to 5.2 percent under 1990 levels. A total of 141 nations agreed to it by 2005. Because the protocol exempted developing nations like China from cuts in emissions, the measure had almost no appeal in Congress, and Clinton never submitted it to Capitol Hill for approval. The protocol, lacking ratification from the United States (which was responsible for 36 percent of the world’s greenhouse-type emissions) and from Russia (17 percent), was not implemented at the time. Still, many liberals were pleased that Clinton had joined in the effort.
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L
OOMING IN THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND
in 1997—and for the remainder of Clinton’s term—was a far more consequential matter: mounting threats of terrorism. While some of these threats emanated from North Korea, whose government was suspected of violating its agreement with the United States in 1994 to stop work on nuclear weapons, the groups that appeared to pose the greatest immediate danger were militantly anti-western Muslims, especially from the Middle East.
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A good deal of this danger, American intelligence agents believed, emanated from Iraq, which remained under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein, and from Iran.

Increasingly worrisome to Clinton were terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden, a well-educated, wealthy native of Saudi Arabia who was expelled from Sudan in 1996 after possibly having been involved in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Bin Laden took refuge in Afghanistan in May 1996, where he allied with the zealously anti-Western regime of the Taliban that had established control over much of the country following the withdrawal of Russian troops in 1989. Bin Laden and his followers, like the Taliban, embraced the teachings of Muslim clerics whose ideological message was profoundly hostile to virtually everything about Western civilization: its cosmopolitanism, secularism, materialism, sensuality, arrogance, support of women’s rights, and obsession with technology.
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Bin Laden especially hated the United States, whose soldiers in Saudi Arabia, he believed, were corrupting the culture of his native land—the holy land of Islam—and whose military power was shoring up the despised Jewish state of Israel.

Bin Laden, aided by wealthy donors from throughout the Persian Gulf region, organized a terrorist network, Al Qaeda, which stepped up recruitment and training of radical Muslim operatives at bases in Afghanistan. Though it was difficult to secure solid information about this secretive and ever evolving organization, rough estimates later concluded that the numbers so trained in the late 1990s exceeded 15,000.
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In February 1998, bin Laden issued a public call for holy war—a “
Jihad
Against Jews and Crusaders”—in which he said that it was the duty of every Muslim to kill Americans and their allies anywhere. In August 1998, truck bombs fashioned by Al Qaeda operatives simultaneously blew up United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The explosions killed more than 300 people, most of them Africans, and wounded more than 4,500. Among the dead were twelve Americans. In October 2000, two Al Qaeda suicide bombers maneuvered an explosives-laden inflatable boat next to an American warship, the U.S.S.
Cole
, which was at anchor at the port of Aden in Yemen. Ramming their boat into the
Cole
, they set off a blast that blew a hole in the side of the warship. The explosion killed seventeen American sailors and wounded thirty-five.

Violent acts such as these indicated that the radical ideas motivating Muslim militants such as bin Laden endangered people in Western nations, including the United States. It was equally obvious that many people loyal to Al Qaeda, to local terrorist cells scattered throughout the world, and to anti-Jewish groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah were fanatics. Unlike commando-style assassins or bomb-planters—as, for instance, many of those who plagued Spain and Northern Ireland—some of these killers were suicide bombers who believed that murder and suicide were holy duties. A few, including teenagers, seemed almost eager to blow themselves up, along with children and others who happened to be in the way, in order to follow the orders of zealous superiors, to be remembered as martyrs, or to consummate their visions of a glorious afterlife.

American intelligence personnel in the late 1990s realized that the World Trade Center in New York City, having been blasted in 1993, was one of a number of possible targets that terrorists might try to hit in the United States. By late 1998, they also knew that radical Muslim terrorists were considering—among a great many other ideas—hijacking of commercial planes and crashing them into buildings.
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As of early 1997, the CIA considered various schemes to capture or kill bin Laden. Clinton mounted diplomatic initiatives—with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Taliban—aimed at persuading the Taliban to evict bin Laden so that he might be captured and put on trial.
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In early 1998, after Saddam Hussein had begun to expel U.N. arms inspectors, Clinton stepped up America’s military presence in the Persian Gulf region for possible war with Iraq. The president, widely criticized abroad as a war-monger, relented only when Hussein finally permitted U.N. arms inspectors to go through his palaces.

After the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Clinton authorized retaliatory cruise missile attacks on a suspected Al Qaeda guerrilla site in Afghanistan and on a pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan that was believed to be manufacturing chemical weapons. In December 1998, by which time Hussein had totally stopped U.N. arms inspections, Clinton asserted that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Starting on December 16, American and British planes launched Operation Desert Fox, which featured four days of around-the-clock air attacks on Iraqi sites. Anglo-American raids resumed in January 1999 and continued, off and on, until the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

Some of these raids were part of a broader counter-terrorism effort during Clinton’s second term, when Congress and executive officials slowly began to build up resources that they had allowed to dwindle following the end of the Cold War. Though it remained a source of energetic partisan dispute in later years whether funding for counter-terrorism rose or fell during the late 1990s, one apparently reliable estimate concluded that appropriations increased considerably—by 50 percent (to $9.7 billion) between fiscal 1998 and fiscal 2001.
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Some terrorist plans, such as so-called millennium plots to bomb Los Angeles Airport and American and Israeli tourists in Jordan in January 2000, were foiled. But an alert Border Patrol guard, not intelligence tips emanating from Washington, was the key to uncovering the plot in Los Angeles: In general, neither Clinton nor the intelligence bureaucracy succeeded in advancing national security.

Reluctant to risk American or Afghan operatives in efforts to kidnap bin Laden, Clinton was also nervous about being branded a “mad bomber.”
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Because he was acutely aware of a selective ban that Ford had ordered on governmentally backed assassinations in peacetime, he apparently refused to approve of such an effort against bin Laden.
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He was also unwilling to damage relations with the oil-rich Saudi regime, an important ally in the Middle East, and did not demand that the Saudis clamp down on terrorist groups believed to be operating in that hotbed of radical, anti-Western resentments.

Legal restrictions, as well as bureaucratic rivalries and miscommunication within the many American government agencies and departments concerned with intelligence, impeded well-coordinated policy formation against terrorism. The FBI, facing restrictions since 1976 on proactive investigations into the activities of domestic extremist groups, was ill informed about terrorist doings in America.
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Computers and other communications equipment at the FBI, which was supposed to foil domestic threats, were antiquated—to the extent that the agency had difficulty circulating information within its own offices, let alone sharing it with the CIA. Moreover, a little-noticed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed in 1977, had appeared to establish a “wall” of sorts against sharing of certain kinds of information between the CIA, which gathered and interpreted overseas intelligence for foreign policy purposes, and the FBI, a criminal investigation bureau. Relations between the two turf-conscious bureaucracies, never warm, remained cool in the 1990s. So did rivalries between the CIA and fourteen other federal intelligence offices, many of which were managed within the Defense Department. These Pentagon offices, employing more than 30,000 people, were estimated to control 80 percent of the American intelligence effort.
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In part because of blunders in the past—dating at least to the Bay of Pigs disaster—American intelligence agencies, notably the CIA, had allowed their use of covert activity to decline. They relied instead on high-tech methods, such as surveillance by satellites, for collecting information. For this reason, and because the United States trained relatively few operatives who were fluent in the languages of hostile nations, intelligence picked up on the ground was weak.
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Moreover, CIA intelligence-gatherers were often the agency’s chief analysts—a practice that impeded fresh evaluation of data. In 1998, the CIA did not discover that India was about to test nuclear bombs; when India did so, Pakistan followed, intensifying tensions between the two nations. America’s intelligence agencies failed to recognize until later that A. G. Khan, Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, was shipping centrifuges and nuclear goods to Iran, North Korea, and Libya.
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In any event, the Taliban had no desire to turn over bin Laden, whose training of terrorists and issuance of blood-curdling proclamations continued. The Clinton administration’s attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, provoking greater rage from bin Laden and his fellow radicals, were of dubious utility.
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With hindsight, it is arguable that the United States might have done well to develop well-financed social and economic policies aimed at improving the lot of oppressed people in the Middle East (and elsewhere)—policies that in the long run might have helped to diminish the fermentation of anti-Western rage in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The United States might also have engaged more aggressively in a war of ideas, as it had during the Cold War era, so as to encourage democratic yearnings among the people of authoritarian nations. It is especially clear in retrospect that the president (and Congress) could have done more to reform the substantial flaws in America’s intelligence gathering. Later events made it obvious that Clinton, who had poor working relationships with top military leaders (and with FBI director Louis Freeh), failed to lessen the likelihood of successful terrorist acts in the United States.