Clinton's Big Lies In Foreign Policy
By Cliff Kincaid
August 25, 2003
Congressman Curt Weldon recently took to the House floor to say, "Enough is Enough," over the barrage of charges about President Bush misleading the U.S. in going to war in Iraq. The president relied on U.S. and British intelligence and United Nations information going back for many years. If there was an intelligence failure, that’s a subject that has to be examined.
But in the case of President Clinton, who committed the U.S. to a war in the former Yugoslavia under false pretenses, Weldon pointed out that the liberal critics of Bush have been noticeably silent.
Weldon asked, " Where were these voices, where were these petitions, where were these outcries when President Clinton told us about the Balkans mass deaths to justify NATO’s invasion into the Balkans? The Clinton administration claimed that ethnic cleansing had killed hundreds of thousands of people…President Clinton told us we would find 100,000 people that were murdered…" Weldon noted that these claims were used to justify a war "where U.S. citizens, where U.S. troops, and where innocent Serbs were killed."
Subsequent investigations have determined that anywhere from one to two thousand had been killed before NATO intervened in the war in Kosovo. That’s the number of Muslims and Serbs who died in a civil war in the province of Yugoslavia. But Weldon said that during the NATO part of the war, a conservative estimate is that 6,000 were killed by the bombs of the U.S., France and Germany and the other NATO countries. Some put the figure of dead at 15,000. Weldon asked, "Where was the outcry by the Democrats [who have been] complaining that… President [Bush] needs to be investigated?"
Weldon said Clinton had also manipulated intelligence to "justify preservation of the outdated ABM treaty and to resist congressional pressure to deploy national missile defense…" He noted that Clinton had asserted that the U.S. would not face an ICBM threat from rogue states for decades and in 1995 took the unprecedented step of releasing a classified national intelligence estimate in an effort to sway public opinion. But the intelligence estimate was criticized by experts, including the Clinton administration’s own director of the CIA, James Woolsey. Just 3 years later, North Korea exposed the Clinton administration lie when it tested a long-range missile.
Weldon cited other lies, including the fact that, "on over 100 occasions, including two State of the Union speeches, President Clinton credited himself with making America’s children safe from the threat of nuclear war through the Moscow declaration of 1994 that supposedly removed the U.S. as a target from the guidance systems of Russian missiles." Weldon said this was a political propaganda statement that had no basis in reality. The Russians later held an exercise simulating a missile strike on the U.S., and then-CIA director Woolsey admitted that the de-targeting agreement was unverifiable and quickly reversible. But the liberal critics of Bush have been silent about that.
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at aimeditor@yahoo.com
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