Our Forgetful Ex-President

It’s long been apparent that former president Bill Clinton has a unique difficulty recalling past events. Indeed, he spent a significant portion of his eight years in the White House telling grand juries and independent counsels that, try as he might, he simply couldn’t remember the exact details of a key conversation or transaction.

Maybe it shouldn’t be alarming, then, that Clinton’s speech to a British Labor Party conference last Wednesday was riddled with duplicity on the issue of Iraq. Now almost two years removed from his presidency, perhaps he has merely forgotten the warnings he once delivered and the actions he once took—or didn’t take—to confront Saddam Hussein’s loathsome reign of terror.

In the address to Labor delegates at their annual gathering, Clinton devoted a lengthy segment to Iraq. After thanking Prime Minister Tony Blair for his support with Operation Desert Fox in December 1998—a joint Anglo-American assault launched when Hussein threw out weapons inspectors—Clinton praised him for “trying to bring America and the rest of the world to a common position” over the past few months. Despite his kind words for Blair, Clinton stressed that a pre-emptive military strike “should always be a last resort,” and he warned President Bush that such an action “may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future.”

In fairness, the speech did not strive to undermine the Bush-Blair alliance in the drastic way that various pundits have asserted. Still, there were two main points on which Clinton’s arguments either completely opposed his earlier statements or were just outright hypocritical.

First, in a total reversal of his previously held position, Clinton argued that “today Saddam Hussein has all the incentive in the world not to use or give these weapons [of mass destruction] away.” This logic is flimsy at best—Hussein has already committed transgressions, such as trying to kill a former U.S. president, that could have ostensibly guaranteed his annihilation—and dangerously naive at worst. But more importantly, it explicitly contradicts Clinton’s prior warnings about the nature of the Iraqi regime.

Consider his stern remarks to a Pentagon audience in February 1998. Hussein, Clinton then cautioned, was doggedly pursuing “an arsenal of deadly destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he’ll use the arsenal. And I think every one of you who has really worked on this for any length of time, believes that, too.” During this same speech Clinton labeled Iraq, in no uncertain terms, “a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals.” Furthermore, in a national address on Dec. 16, 1998—the day that Operation Desert Fox began—he assured the American people that military strikes were needed because Hussein had historically proven that he actually would use his deadly technology. “I have no doubt today,” Clinton maintained, “that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.” Just for emphasis, he added this forceful affirmation: “Mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.”

We are left to wonder: Which is it? Does Clinton believe Iraq’s dictator is a reasonable type who can be deterred by U.S. power? Or does he regard him as the sort of man who would provide lethal weaponry to terrorist cells and use the threat of a well-stocked arsenal to challenge for Middle-Eastern hegemony? Though Bill Clinton once guaranteed that Hussein would indeed utilize his weapons “some day,” he appears to have changed his mind.

Second, Clinton told Labor politicians that “the West has a lot to answer for in Iraq,” specifically mentioning that “in the Gulf War the Shi’ites in the South East of Iraq were urged to rise up and then were cruelly abandoned to their fate as [Hussein] came in and killed large numbers of them.” The United States, he said, “cannot walk away from them,” and it “cannot forget that we are not blameless in the misery under which they suffer and we must continue to support them.”

While Clinton was quick to indirectly blame the first Bush administration for not aiding the Shi’ites in 1991, he conveniently forgot to mention his administration’s litany of failings in Iraq. Those include the following: the decision in 1993 to prohibit the Iraqi National Congress (INC)—an umbrella group of resistance forces—from using American funds to buy weapons, the abandonment of the INC just before its March 1995 offensive against the Iraqi army, the refusal to sponsor a peace-monitoring force to unite hostile Kurdish factions and the withdrawal of support from INC personnel in the northern “safe-haven” in 1996 (at which point they were ousted by Hussein’s tanks). If Clinton has now become a fierce proponent of “trying to strengthen” the Iraqi opposition, as he intimated last week, it is a significant turnaround from the policies he followed during his tenure in the White House.

Ultimately, before Bill Clinton makes any more speeches about regime change in Iraq, he ought to review the facts—including his previous assurances about Hussein’s willingness to deploy or transfer weapons of mass destruction and his own administration’s culpability in the ongoing “misery” of the Iraqi people. But given the former president’s tendency toward selective memory and self-reverence, don’t count on it.

Duncan M. Currie ’04, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Leverett House.