Why Does Clinton Matter?

Having watched the Chris Wallace verbal skirmish with Bill Clinton, I can only conclude one thing -- Clinton is still Bubba, but he's increasingly less relevant to the world in which we live.

There's plenty of points to debate out of the interview. I can think of three main questions:

1. Did Clinton do an effective job fighting Islamic terrorists?
2. Did he get support or grief from the right for his efforts?
3. Was he unfairly hamstrung by his political opposition or was it his own peccadillos?

Here's the sad thing -- none of these questions is truly relevant or important to actually fighting the War on Terror.

Look, I don't think President Clinton did a good job against terrorism in the 1990's, but I consider most of his foreign policy to be feckless. But even that's not the point. It's fair to state that Clinton didn't do enough, but it's also correct to point out that neither did anyone else. Bubba gets the heat because he was the head chef, but the rest of the folks involved (the GOP Congress, the media, the American people) were barely more interested in the issue. Ed Morrissey says something similar here...

For five years, we have rehashed this long and embarrassing history of American cluelessness. It is a bipartisan history, with both Republicans and Democrats arguing at various times that administrations used terrorism as an excuse for their political benefit. All it does is poison the atmosphere and allow hyperpartisans to play gotcha games with political opponents.

The time has come -- it has long since come -- for that history to become just that: history. None of us can pretend that Bill Clinton could ever have declared war on al-Qaeda in the manner Bush did without having a 9/11-type event as a catalyst. Not only would the Left have screamed much as they do now, albeit without the Hugo Chavez-type conspiratorial thinking, Republicans would have never given Clinton the kind of support needed to send American troops into Afghanistan. The political climate had been thoroughly poisoned by the time of the African bombings and Congress would never have put aside its deathmatch with Clinton to unite in a war effort, especially against a band of terrorists most Americans didn't know existed.

All of this is prologue to 9/11, and none of the debate changes the fact that two decades of leadership dropped the ball on the rise of Islamist terrorism. Blaming one without blaming them all has solved nothing and teaches nothing. More to the point, it divides the nation for no purpose, and five years after 9/11, it's time we stopped allowing it.

I don't think we can stop allowing it, but we can stop engaging in it. Very few people were focused on the issue the way we needed to focus on it prior to 9/11. Think back to the 2000 election. Remember all those questions Gore and Bush fielded on terrorism in the debates? No, neither do I.

Of course, Clinton brought the tempest back with a vengeance with his response to Wallace. With most people, I'd say this just points to Wallace touching a nerve with a sensitive question, but I tend not to give a politician as gifted as Bill Clinton that little credit -- if this isn't Bubba having a calculated response, I'd be stunned.

However, as one must always note, he does get some crucial facts wrong. Jake Tapper nails the biggest mistake in pointing out the fact that the folks raising the "Wag the Dog" scenario were coming from the mainstream media far more than the right. Tapper points out that the missile attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan following the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania received full support from Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, National Review and Pat Buchanan. Even critical Republicans, like Dan Coats, caught flak for raising the "Wag the Dog" charge. The always informative Tom Maguire backs Tapper up.

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty assails Clinton's claim that no one knew that Osama was at work in Somalia by noting that the Justice Department later issued an indictment to this effect and the media noted it as early as 1994 (and Maguire's piece noted the same). Contrary to Clinton's challenge that the Bush Administration never received these questions from Fox News, Patterico points out that Wallace asked Don Rumsfeld essentially the same questions more than two years ago; he also notes that Richard Clarke contradicted Clinton's assertion that a counter-terrorism plan was left in place for Bush by Clinton, and that Clinton is wrong to assert that Clarke was fired. And Andrew McCarthy points out that it's difficult to draw any conclusions if we don't know what papers Sandy Berger tried to purloin from the National Archives.

Does any of this matter? Not really. Clinton's efforts against terrorism in the 1990's weren't enough. But no one else was screaming about it being insufficient, left or right. Jonah Goldberg has it right...

Look: as far as I'm concerned nobody colored themselves in too much glory prior to 9/11. But al Qaeda rose to power in the 1990s largely in response to the Clinton administration's failure to take numerous provocations seriously enough. I honestly don't see how that can be denied. Republicans should have pushed Clinton to do the right thing, and didn't. I don't see how that can be denied. And when Bush came to office, he didn't do enough in those eight months prior to the attacks. That's undebiable too. Everyone deserves blame. The question is how should it be divided up.

I don't care how the blame gets divided. I want to know where to go from here. Rehashing the past doesn't accomplish much at this point. I guess it helps Clinton and his defenders to try to keep additional stains off his legacy (yes, sorry for the pun) or Clinton detractors to further tarnish him. But much like Bill himself, the issue is increasingly irrelevent. We can learn from the mistakes of the past, but obsessing over whose fault they were isn't going to give us an answer for the future.