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| Return to: Left History: a digital archive | Return to: Say no to imperialist wars! | Return to: NATO-Yugoslav War Internet Resources |
History is going to be a vicious judge of Bill Clinton's foreign policy machinations.
The man who answered 1992 campaign questions about international affairs with the response, "It's the economy, stupid,'' has never shown anything more than a passing interest in global affairs -- unless, of course, a campaign contribution or some other political advantage could be gained by his engagement.
Thus will historians be able to chart the bombings, "terrorist'' hunts and wars launched at times roughly coinciding with personal challenges at home for the president. Who can forget the remarkable "coincidence'' that occurred last December when, just as the congressional debate over Monica Lewinsky's thong bikini was getting hot and heavy, Clinton realized it was time to launch massive bombing raids against Iraq?
Want to bet how that will play on the Clinton administration timeline?
Of course, history is just about the only force that holds superpowers accountable, so Clinton will see his administration out without having to face the music for his tendency to use missiles to create diversions from his domestic embroilments.
And as the British parliamentarian Tony Benn says, the most important history is that which tells of recent events -- since this is the place at which patterns begin to be defined and analyzed.
It is within this context that Saturday's War Crimes Tribunal on U.S. foreign policy involving Iraq, Yugoslavia, Colombia, East Timor and other lands will take place. It's unlikely that an indictment by this tribunal will cause much quaking in a Clinton White House that has already survived Hurricane Starr, but this is one of the places where the indictment of history will begin to be written, and a dramatic one it will be.
Madison's U.S. Out Now group, which has a long and impressive record of raising the tough questions about U.S. interventions around the world, has drawn together a fine roster of speakers, including Bob McChesney, the Madison-based media critic who has earned international acclaim for his book, "Rich Media, Poor Democracy'' (University of Illinois Press), and Diane Farsetta, the UW graduate student whose courageous work in East Timor has been highlighted in these pages.
National specialists on intervention issues, such as Sara Flounders from former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark's International Action Center and Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, will address the event. And the indictment will be wrapped up and delivered by none other than Alexander Cockburn, the Nation magazine columnist whose trenchant commentary on U.S. foreign policy has influenced so many of our perspectives over the past several decades.
Cockburn's presence is particularly important, since no journalist has a more consistent record of deconstructing U.S. foreign policy -- be it Reagan's Contra war, Bush's Panama invasion or Clinton's Yugoslav imbroglio -- than he. And no national writer, not even Cockburn's Nation colleague Christopher Hitchens, has been onto Clinton for so very long.
That's especially true when it comes to Clinton's fluid, yet always personally convenient, approach to foreign policy.
Cockburn warned us back in 1992, when presidential candidate Clinton was dodging questions about his Vietnam-era draft avoidance.
"It's a measure of Clinton that he should be muddying up the most visibly principled political act of his life -- namely, his opposition to the war in Vietnam,'' Cockburn wrote. "He hops about, telling one silly fib after another, till he's managed to convert principle into something devious. Why be apologetic for refusing to napalm peasants, shoot old women in paddy fields or herd villagers into concentration camps while dumping Agent Orange on their forests?''
The only thing that has changed over the past eight years is that the silly fibs have grown deadly serious. The conversion of principle into something devious continues unabated.