October 16, 2024
Some errors cost more than others, but we never recognize them as errors until it's too late.
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President Donald Trump worries that Afghanistan will devolve into a “laboratory for terror.” President Trump is right to fear that.
President Donald Trump worries that Afghanistan will devolve into a “laboratory for terror.” President Trump is right to fear that.

On August 7, 1998, more than 200 people were killed in terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. Americans learned three names most of them never had heard before: Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda.

On August 20, 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered a cruise-missile strike on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory north of Khartoum, Sudan, and the bombing of a purported al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. The Clinton administration said the factory was producing nerve gas and that its operators were linked to al-Qaeda. These attacks were preceded by two other noteworthy events: On Christmas Day, 1997, the film Wag the Dog, about a president who creates a fictional pretense for a war to distract from a sexual scandal, was released. On January 17, 1998, the Drudge Report broke the Clinton–Lewinsky story. Clinton would later announce Operation Desert Fox, a bombing campaign against Iraq, just as impeachment hearings against him were being opened in Congress.

It is impossible to say what President Clinton was thinking during all that — was he really attempting to “wag the dog”? Was the Iraq campaign “Monica’s War,” as the comedians called it? No one can say, and it is no good asking Bill Clinton, who is so habitually dishonest that he probably has forgotten how to tell the truth, and may not even know what it is.

But we do know, in part, what Osama bin Laden was thinking.

[…]

See Also:

(1) Trump is not the one dividing us by race. His rivals are obsessed with ‘white privilege’

(2) Trump and the Black Vote

(3) President Trump decision to end DACA was lawful, Justice Department says

(4) Trump has no plans to replace Pence on ticket

(5) The left’s vile smear of America’s founding

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