Posted by Josh Rosenau on December 24, 2006 Ivo Daalder examines Candidate Bush’s critiques of Clinton-era foreign policy with President Bush’s foreign policy. You can imagine the result when I tell you that the first item he quotes from the 2000 GOP foreign policy platform is “The [Clinton] administration has run America?s defenses down over the decade through inadequate resources, promiscuous commitments, and the absence of a forward-looking military strategy.”
It’s like looking in a mirror.
This reminds me of the Daily Show bit where they had President Bush debate Governer Bush.
It’s an interesting article, but the comment thread contains quite a bit of exculpatory crap about Clinton and the Serbian bombing campaign.
The facts are almost identical between Iraq and Kosovo. Both campaigns accomplished pretty much nothing in the way of permanent solutions to the problems they purported ameliorate. Both were based on pretexts that were tenuous at best (Clinton came about as close to finding evidence for a “genocide” in Kosovo as Bush to finding WMD’s in Iraq), and both were preceded by media blitzes that parroted White House propaganda. In addition, the now familiar buzz-words (“Hitler”, “Nazis”, “genocide”) were also used in Kosovo, as a third rate Communist Party apparatchik who posed absolutely no threat to our security or legitimate interests was made out to be “the new Hitler”.
Of course, we can give Clinton credit for one thing: he was smart enough not to send in ground troops and produce a similar quagmire to our current situation in Iraq.
Clinton also acted with the approval and support of much of the world. As for the genocide in Kosovo, a quick search on Google turned up [url=http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Kosovo/Kosovo-Massacres.htm]solid evidence of Kosovar Albanians being lined up and shot[/url].
While it may not have been on the scale of the concentration camps built and filled in the Serb/Croat fighting, I’m inclined to think it’s a good thing that violence at that scale was prevented.
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is formerly a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not battling creationists or modeling species ranges, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.
The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.
December 24, 2006
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