Soccer Mom: Unplugged

You don't have to be a monster to be an American president.  But Bill Clinton was. 

1- He changed the policy in Somalia where US forces had been acting in a purely humanitarian capacity, putting soldiers in the unenviable position of nation-building and hunting down warlords.  When the mission changed and MG Montgomery asked for more firepower - troops and equipment, Les Aspin said "uh-no."  This left our guys high and dry and a month later 18 died, 80 were wounded and some were desecrated posthumously, having their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

2- By the way - he left them so unsupported that we had to borrow tanks and armored personnel carriers from Pakistan and Malaysia.

3- In the Balkans, Bill engineered the Dayton peace accords and interjected American troops into a region of the world with absolutely no US interests.  While our soldiers have done a magnificent job staving off the civil wars that erupt periodically, the five year mission that Bill advertised has already turned into a ten year excursion.  There is no exit strategy for the military in this region because the peace (if you can call it that) is so tenuous that we can't afford to leave.  We now have what appears to be a permanent American force in Bosnia and Kosovo.  (And the cost of that venture reached 15 billion before he even left office. Bill's policy was to exagerrate and outright invent atrocities - fabricating a genocide that never happened in Kosovo.  To resolve the apparent imbalance (Bill made muslims the victims in that fairy tale) mujahadeen were imported from the Middle East to fight. 

4-  Bill bombed Serbia against the will of congress (they actually voted not to authorize him to use such force) and in doing such was the first US prez to act in direct opposition to congress. 

5- Under Bill's direction the US Information Agency purported that hundreds of thousands of Albanian Muslims had been slaughtered when in acuality there were no mass graves.  "The Spanish forensic surgeon Emilio Perez Pujol, who was dispatched to uncover evidence of Serbian atrocities, reported that 'we did not find one - not one - mass grave.'" (This quote taken from Thomas Woods Jr's 2004 book)

6- I won't even detail the bombing of El Shifa - the pharmaceutical company.  When he wagged the dog because Monica was giving testimony  before the grand jury.  Suffice it to say that the soil sample used to show that El Shifa was really a WMD manufacturing plant in disguise, like so many other things in the Clinton White House, never showed up.

7- Also according to Woods' count Clinton "dispatched the military overseas an amazing forty-four time during his eight years.  The American military had been deployed outside of our borders only eight times in the previous forty-five years."

Now, there are things about the current war that I don't like.  Finding WMDs would have done a lot to quiet the naysayers but WMDs or not, I would have sent guys in to take out Saddam.  The footage you can link to from my last post is more than enough reason for him to be out of power.  Not to mention gassing the Kurds.  But there is one thing you cannot deny no matter how many rumors, how much innuendo and how many brazen and outright lies are fabricated about George W. Bush, you know where he stands every step of the way.  He never said the transition would be easy.  It hasn't been.  He said Saddam was a ruthless tyrant and a homicidal killer.  The bodies and mass graves are numberless.  He said that we thought there were WMDs or the capacity to produce them.  WMDs have been found (not in the quantities that the press and the liberals demand - but then again, what amount would truly satisfy them?).  You could pick apart the details but every piece of intelligence that this president saw (and that has been made public) could have gone either way. We all knew from day one that the relationship with Al-Queda was circumstancial at best.  What the president listed in his address as evidence of a connection between Osama and Baghdad was never strong. 

So, if you felt you were deceived going into Iraq, then you just weren't paying attention.  If, on the other hand you are just plain disgusted with the US military being sent around the globe like a world cop,  I'd suggest you give Bill Clinton a call.