A FATAL LACK OF VISION By David A. Chodack Were the bombings - either our embassies, or their terrorist installations - a result of Bill Clinton's sex troubles? No one has found any direct proof tying them together, but one thing we can say about all three incidents, one thing they all have in common, is that they all stem from a profound lack of vision among those we have anointed as our leaders. Whether the terrorists chose to strike our embassies because they we were weakened by Clinton's sex scandals, is besides the point. That may or may not have affected the timing of the attacks, but they would have come sooner or later, with or without Monica Lewinsky and Ken Starr. After all, we armed these terrorists and encouraged them to rise up and fight against the infidel, anti-Islamic influences of the Soviet Union. We not only gave them weapons and paid for their training, but we helped fan their hatred and everything they hated about the Soviets, they hate about us, as well. Our leaders should have been able to predict that once the Soviets and their allies were driven out of Afghanistan, the Western world would be the next target for the wrath of these holy warriors. After all, it isn't as if we didn't have any experience dealing with this phenomenon. Once upon a time, there were only two major terrorist groups in the world and only one of them was any real threat to Americans. The IRA attacked only British and Irish targets and only the Palestinians attacked American civilians. Then we let Khomeini and his brand of Islamic fanaticism take over in Iran. Now we had a new enemy and a new source of anti-American terrorism, which in turn emboldened Gadaffi in Libya and the Iranian-backed Shiite fanatics in Lebanon to attack America and innocent Americans in the name of Islam. Did we learn from these experiences? No, instead, we went out and armed and trained the very groups who hated us and vowed to destroy us, because we kidded ourselves that they hated the Soviets even more, since the Soviets were the big, local super power. We wanted to destroy the Soviet Union at any cost and so we decided that the enemies of our enemy were our friends, never thinking about what would happen once our common enemy was out of the way. Now we are paying the price for those decisions. During and after World War II, we had leaders who were men of vision, a paraplegic who his disability from the country and ruled from his wheel chair, generals who were also statesmen and visionaries, as much concerned with shaping the peace as they were with winning the war. These men had learned their lessons from history, from World War I and its aftermath. They knew it was not enough to crush Germany, Italy and Japan. If we wanted lasting peace then we also had to rebuild those countries, make them prosperous, to keep them contented and peaceful. They also realized that we could not take on the whole world as a rebuilding project. Therefore, there was no point to marching on Moscow and finishing the war once and for all. It was better to leave the Soviet Union intact, even let the Russians surround themselves with a buffer of satellite states that they would be responsible for supporting and concentrate on saving Western Europe and Japan. A Cold War was better than a hot one and better than America being forced to rebuild the Soviet Union and all of Eastern Europe besides. Eisenhower and Marshall and the rest were serious anti-Communists, but they realized that the real goal was containing the Soviets and keeping them weak enough so they could never really afford to attack us, rather than destroying them completely. Somewhere along the way, these leaders retired and died off and we were left with leaders who have trouble seeing much beyond the present and the immediate future, right up until the next election. So now, the Soviet Union is dead and what's replaced it? International terrorism and organized crime. The Soviets kept a lid on things simply because they were brutal and undemocratic. They kept the terrorists states and the freelance terrorist groups under control. If they didn't like the United States, then the Soviets were the only ones they could turn to and the Soviets never made any pretense of being democrats. It was strictly their way or the highway and the Soviets had too much to lose by directly attacking or provoking us. Now the terrorists have no one to answer to and nothing to lose. Just as we no longer seem to have leaders with any grasp of the big picture when it comes to foreign policy, leaders with no idea of how to lead, The truly sad, frightening thing about the current scandals involving President Clinton and his misdeeds, real and imagined, is not that we have a President who is lacking in moral character. We have had plenty of Presidents like that in the past and the country survived. The difference now is that we have a President who has lost control of his life. There is no question that that the president has done all he could and more to bring on his troubles himself. He has had problems explaining his sexual relationships in the past. He has also had a top aide resign because of a sex - and indiscretion - scandal, but this taught the President nothing. He deliberately engages in risky, inappropriate behavior with a woman younger than any of those he is accused of being involved with in the past, more naïve, ambitious, starry eyed and unstable - even delusional - than the women in the past, a troubled young woman, bound to cause trouble sooner or later, one way or the other. Forget the President's morals - or the lack of them - it is lack of judgment and lack of vision which are truly frightening. What is even more frightening, is that the President has also had plenty of help getting into this predicament and dragging the whole country and possibly the world, with him. He's had help from friends, enemies and almost everyone in between. You could really say that it all started with then-Congresswoman Barbara Boxer and her widely publicized crusades against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Senator Robert Packwood. They were both Republicans and alleged sexual harassers, so leading the campaigns against them seemed to be a no-lose proposition at the time. It helped propel Democrat Boxer into the Senate. It was a heady time for women and for Democrats and there was little or no thought given to the long term effects of making the sex lives of government officials a public matter. No one seemed to think of the impact this would have on the country, or the Democratic party. It was if they really believed these were one time issues which would never come up again and again and again, as if they really believed that all Democratic politicians were above reproach. Then there was the United States Supreme Court - including the Presidents own appointees - who decided that anyone could sue a sitting President rather than wait for him or her to leave office. They decided that anyone- even someone who clearly had no legally defensible case even if she could prove all her allegations - could disrupt the functioning of the country at will, by hauling the President of the United States into court and forcing him or her to spend precious time responding. There was the trail judge who ruled that a plaintiff claiming sexual harassment on even the flimsiest of possible grounds could then harass her alleged harasser at will and force him to reveal intimate details of his personal life. Even worse, she could harass other women she had never even met and who had done her no possible harm, exposing their intimate sexual details in public and forcing them to hire expensive attorneys. The fact that the same judge later wisely threw the whole case out, makes the original ruling even more shortsighted. Then of course, there is Kenneth Starr, who unilaterally decided that only he could determine whether the President of the United States has ever been guilty of any sort of wrongdoing at any point in his life. He kept expanding his investigation and his power to match his own ambition and sense of self-righteousness. Fortunately for us, our country hasn't always been run this way. JFK was hardly a model of either marital fidelity or self-restraint, but he never caused an open scandal or endangered his Presidency. He restricted himself to call girls and married women and the closest his activities ever came to threatening the Presidency or the country was when he was rumored to be having an affair with the wife of the British ambassador. Even if it was true, this was not about to jeopardize anything more than a marriage and personal relationships among diplomats and other insiders. Britain was and is too close an ally for our national relationships to be affected by anything like that and there was no worry about state secrets. Most important, the press and other branches of government took the sensible attitude that JFK's affairs were neither the public's business, nor matters of grave national concern. Therefore, the President was free to concentrate on running the country until Lee Harvey Oswald came along. BACK TO SOCIAL COMMENTARY PAGE HOME PAGE |