Clinton on Bush

Bill Clin­ton has also weighed in on the sub­ject of the real focus at the White House:

A Texas Demo­c­ra­tic fundraiser, speak­ing not for attri­bu­tion, told me about the lunch he recently had at the home of for­mer Pres­i­dent Clin­ton in the New York sub­urbs. Clin­ton recounted his last meet­ing with Pres­i­dent Bush over cof­fee, just before the inau­gu­ra­tion on Jan. 20, 2001. The out­go­ing pres­i­dent coun­seled his suc­ces­sor that he would face five chal­lenges in the inter­na­tional arena – the Israeli– Pales­tin­ian con­flict, the Al Qaeda ter­ror­ist threat, a nuclear-armed North Korea, the India-Pakistan con­fronta­tion, and the Sad­dam Hus­sein dic­ta­tor­ship in Iraq.
Clin­ton was sur­prised at Bush’s response. He said he dis­agreed with Clinton’s order – that he con­sid­ered Sad­dam Hus­sein to be the pri­mary threat that he would have to deal with.

The drum­beat is steady and grow­ing louder. Bob Wood­ward, Rand Beers, Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Bill Clin­ton, Karen Kwiatkowski… All have come for­ward with a remark­ably con­sis­tent story — That Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and a coterie of oth­ers in his admin­is­tra­tion were fix­ated on get­ting rid of Sad­dam from before they came into office. They weren’t focused on al Qaeda or other Islamic ter­ror­ism. There may well be “plenty of blame to go around,” as I was coun­seled yes­ter­day. It’s prob­a­ble that Bill Clin­ton didn’t do enough to fight ter­ror­ism. But when the WTC was bombed in Feb­ru­ary 1993, mere days after Clin­ton took office, I don’t recall a bunch of Democ­rats run­ning around blam­ing George H.W. Bush for the fail­ure. And they cer­tainly weren’t blam­ing George H.W. Bush three years into Clinton’s first term for the fail­ure.
Yes­ter­day, Richard Clarke apol­o­gized to the fam­i­lies of the 9/11 vic­tims for fail­ing them. When will oth­ers in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion admit a sim­i­lar fail­ing and apologize?

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts