POLITICS-U.S.: Raids Followed Concern Over Foreign-Policy Image

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug 23 1998 (IPS) - Thursday’s cruise-missile attacks against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan followed growing concern here that the credibility of U.S. power overseas has been badly eroded by months of retreat or inaction on key foreign-policy fronts.

Failure by President Bill Clinton to follow through on high- profile threats against foreign leaders, such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, spurred rising criticism in recent weeks from much of the foreign-policy elite.

“We’ve really been remarkably ineffective in recent months,” conceded one senior State Department official who asked not to be identified. “Apart from the China summit and dealing with the (European Union) on Iran and Cuba, we haven’t made much headway on anything of serious importance.”

Clinton’s passivity, whether due to the personal and legal problems arising from the Monica Lewinsky scandal or his increasingly bitter wrangles with Republicans in Congress, has undermined Washington’s position in key regions, according to these observers.

Earlier this month, Thomas Friedman, who writes the Foreign Affairs’ column in the ‘New York Times’, shocked Washington by suggesting that Clinton resign if he is too distracted to address these challenges.

Noting tough administration threats against leaders like Hussein and Milosevic, Friedland wrote immediately after the U.S. embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that “activist rhetoric without an activist President looks like empty bluster.”

“We end up with all the disadvantages of being the world’s richest and most powerful nation – everyone makes you a target – without any of the advantages, like feeling as though we are shaping world events our way,” he added.

Indeed, as Friedman and other commentators have noted, Washington has suffered a string of potentially serious foreign- policy defeats in recent months as foreign foes and friends have ignored or attacked U.S. interests.

Last May, for example, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued a public ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: to either sign on to a U.S. compromise plan to withdraw forces form the West Bank or be named as the principal obstacle to reviving the comatose Arab-Israeli peace process.

Netanyahu poured scoured on her threat and launched a lobbying campaign to have it disavowed. Clinton declined to back up Albright with the result that the Oslo process may have finally reached its terminal stage.

The same month, India – without so much as a ‘by your leave’ – exploded five nuclear devices, dealing a major blow to the administration’s non-proliferation policy. Despite strenuous lobbying, including personal telephone calls by Clinton to Premier Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan went ahead with its own tests.

Clinton imposed tough sanctions against both countries, as required by existing U.S. law, and then, under pressure from U.S. business and farm interests, worked with Congress to repeal the toughest ones.

In June, when Milosevic launched offensives against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Washington responded with new threats, including possible military intervention, backed up by high- profile NATO air force exercises over the skies along the Albanian- Serbian border.

Milosevic ignored them. Since then, some 500 mostly civilian Kosovars have been killed and 200,000 more driven from their homes by “ethnic cleansing” tactics that have created one of the worst humanitarian disasters of 1998.

Similarly, Saddam Hussein’s decision in early August to suspend all cooperation with U.N. arms inspectors, despite a written agreement with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan last February, constituted a major challenge to Clinton’s public pledge to take military action – unilaterally, if necessary – if he failed to comply.

The February agreement, reached under the threat of U.S. air strikes, was cited by the administration when it was signed as a perfect example of “diplomacy backed by force” – which it claims as the hallmark of Clinton’s past successes in dealing with such hotspots as Haiti and Bosnia.

But the failure to follow through with force is making a mockery of that strategy, according to Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, who called for “swift” retaliation against those responsible for the embassy bombings in East Africa.

“The Iraqi and Yugoslav dictators … illustrate the increasingly apparent shortcoming of making threat-based diplomacy the biggest arrow in the quiver,” Hoagland wrote last week. “Clinton’s threats become less credible as he has become more distracted and embattled at home.”

Indeed. Meanwhile, the persistence and spread of the Asian financial crisis, Clinton’s failure so far to get Congress to approve 18 billion dollars the administration says is desperately needed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and signs that North Korea may be building a new nuclear facility in the absence of promised U.S. aid added to the rising sense of impotence in recent weeks. “We can’t even get (U.S. allies) Eritrea and Ethiopia to stop fighting,” noted one Congressional aide last week.

“This administration for the last seven months has neglected compelling national-security threats besides (the embassy bombings),” noted Sen. John McCain, a Republican who spoke out in strong support of Thursday’s cruise-missile attacks.

“I hope that the president will not confine his activities to just this, but (will) address the other very compelling problems that also affect our nation’s security problems long-term,” added McCain, who is considered a strong contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2000.