September 18, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Andrew Sullivan takes Lawrence Wright's
Andrew Sullivan takes Lawrence Wright's amazing piece on Al-Quaeda as a savage indictment of Clinton's foreign policy. Which it is. Don't get me wrong; I think Clinton's foreign policy was disastrous for the country. But I also think we have to take a lot of the blame ourselves.
Most of us wanted to think that we didn't need the military any more. We voted for Isolationsim Lite. Clinton was the ultimate poll driven president -- if we'd wanted a strong foreign policy, we could have had it. All we had to do was ask. But the only people who cared about stuff like that were mostly the same people who wouldn't have voted for Clinton if Jesus Christ Himself had walked across the Potomac and endorsed him. The rest of us were too busy totting up our peace dividend and trying to figure out if it would stretch to cover a new stereo and a DVD player.
Two weeks before 9/11 I was having dinner with 3 people who loudly assured me that we should cut military spending to the bone in order to pay for more social programs, because now that the Cold War was over we didn't need all that useless stuff.
But defense spending is like your immune system, I argued. It sucks up a lot of resources and doesn't do anything -- until you really need it, when you want it to still be strong enough to defend you.
They were having none of it.
[I don't want to imply in any way that I was some sort of prescient commentator who knew what was coming. I didn't. I didn't expect any threat any time soon -- I just thought it would be nice to have the military around if we needed them. Plus, I love Fleet Week.]
They were America in the 90's. We were too busy buying Pets.com to worry about what those crazy foreigners were up to. And we wanted to believe that every conflict could be solved if both sides would just sit down and talk it out. If you want someone to blame -- well, I'm sure we all have a mirror handy.
Of course, after 9/11, I didn't say I told you so. I had better things to worry about. And so do we, now. Let's learn from Clinton's mistakes, instead of wasting energy placing blame.
Update: On a similar vein, I'm seeing Bill O'Reilly is trying to get an investigation of whether Clinton was outright bribed to pardon Marc Rich. Can we please move the [expletive deleted] on, folks? What are you going to do, impeach him again? I'm not sure whether it's actually even a crime to sell pardons, since the pardon is supposedly inviolate. (Lawyers who want to weigh in on an interesting academic question, rather than Clinton-bashing, I'd be interested to know the answer to that one). All this does is stir up partisan bickering at the time when we least need it. So righties -- stop poking Clinton with a stick, and maybe he'll leave you alone.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 18, 2002 6:08 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links