The Other "Blue Dress Moment"

Things just keep getting worse for Bubba.

It was bad enough that his attempts to censor the recent "Road to 9/11" mini-series backfired and instead exposed his incompetence in dealing with al Qaeda, reminding the world that he allowed an attempted chemical weapons attack on Manhattan to go unchallenged militarily. Now the ripples of North Korea's nuclear (or not) blast have shown the 1994 Agreed Framework Clinton allowed Jimmy Carter to lead has led us to our present state of affairs. North Korea, a rogue state that has always sold every weapons system it has ever developed to the highest bidder is threatening to fire a nuclear-armed missile. Given their history, we might look at this as both nuclear gamesmanship and a product demonstration.

As time wears on and more failures are revealed, William Jefferson Clinton, the charismatic Man From Hope, is proving to be arguably the least competent foreign policy President of the twentieth century.

It must be said that every president since the early 1970s has failed in one way or another in dealing with terrorism. From Nixon and Ford, down through Carter and Reagan, to George H.W. Bush, Americans suffered through a string of terrorist attacks nearly unanswered.

Bill Clinton, however, established a new low point of inaction. He froze out his CIA Director, never meeting with him in two years, leading Woolsey to resign in disgust. Even though a new terror network was emerging to confront America directly, Clinton continued to treat the matter as a law enforcement issue. Clinton steadfastly refused to confront terrorism, as even his own top advisor Dick Morris noted:

The weekly strategy meetings at the White House throughout 1995 and 1996 featured an escalating drumbeat of advice to President Clinton to take decisive steps to crack down on terrorism. The polls gave these ideas a green light. But Clinton hesitated and failed to act, always finding a reason why some other concern was more important.

Clinton's unstated policy ignoring of the growing threat of al Qaeda emboldened them, leading to a plot that ultimately unfolded on the morning of September 11, 2001. Jumping office workers in Manhattan, a flaming facade in the Pentagon, and a rubble-strewn field in Pennsylvania are the legacy of President Clinton's decision to always find "some other concern" instead of acting against an increasingly bold al Qaeda terrorist network.

But what Clinton didn't accomplish against terrorism while he was in office may eventually pale in comparison to his incompetence in allowing rogue states to develop the technology to manufacture nuclear warheads and the weapons systems to deliver them.

On Clinton's watch, China successfully sold a conversion plant to Iran and the gas need to test the uranium enrichment process. In 1996, as Clinton froze out the CIA Director, Iran was busily constructing the Arak heavy water plant. Iran began the secret uranium enrichment facility at Natanz in 2000.

During the same time period, North Korea was secretly expanding it's nuclear weapons research and designing long-range multi-stage missiles, even as the gullible Clinton sent Secretary of State Madeline Albright to fulfill her own historical blue dress moment.

Bill Clinton left office in 2001, leaving us a world safe for terrorism instead of from it, and with two rogue nations developing nuclear weapons programs. Perhaps we cold have known of all of these programs far earlier, had he and Congressional Democrats not emasculated with constant calls for intelligence agency budget cuts.

Bill Clinton fundamentally misunderstood the threats posed by rouge nations aspiring to nuclear weapons capability and blinded American intelligence agencies that may have exposed them earlier. He fundamentally understood the causes of and how to confront Islamic terrorism.

Clinton's "do nothing" legacy is echoed today by Democratic Senators and Congressmen that rose through the ranks during his presidency. These Senators and Congressmen—Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi among them—still hold desperately to the same flawed misconceptions that led us to a point where are today. We now face not one, but two rouge nations on the cusp of being able to provide terrorist organizations with nuclear warheads.

President Clinton's "blue dress moment" with a White House intern led to the President being exposed as a distracted man with weak moral values who lied under oath.

President Clinton’s other "blue dress moment," —sending Madeline Albright to negotiate for a piece of paper that was never honored—now becomes emblematic of his failures on the nuclear proliferation front as well, and may ultimately be a far more damning part of his legacy of charismatic incompetence.