The Telegraph - London - 09/24/1998
AMERICA'S impeachment crisis could have dangerous consequences, inviting fresh trouble at a time when world affairs are already
in acute distress, says the former director of the CIA.
Hostile states such as Iraq were likely to "discount the United States heavily" as a force in the world, says James Woolsey. He
believes paralysis in Washington will prevent the US government from responding to provocations.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Woolsey gave a caustic assessment of the President he served until his abrupt resignation in
January 1995. Dismissing Bill Clinton as a "tactician", he said the foreign policy of the administration was driven by opinion polls,
short-term PR calculations and the spin-cycle rhythm of an election campaign.
"If you want to know how they make decisions, all you need do is watch the War Room," he said, referring to the documentary of Mr
Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign.
During his two years as Director of Central Intelligence, Mr Woolsey managed to secure only two conversations with Mr Clinton.
"It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with him. I just didn't have any relationship," said Mr Woolsey. He believes the damage to the
American national interest has been substantial, though largely hidden from view. Mr Woolsey compared the global scene to the
late 1920s when inchoate foreign threats were ignored, played down, and ultimately allowed to escalate.
He said US policy towards Iraq was "feckless and flaccid". Mr Clinton's midnight bombing of an empty building in Baghdad in 1993
was a "laughable" gesture, an inadequate response to an Iraqi assassination plot against former President Bush.
"We should have hit the instruments of state power," he said. "It was exhibit number one of a paper tiger." Exhibit number two was
the failure to intervene to stop the Erbil massacre in northern Iraq in 1996. Exhibit number three had been the collapse of the UN
weapons inspection regime, blamed by Mr Woolsey on the capricious manouevres of the Russians and the French, as well as the
incompetence of the Clinton administration.
"We've not been willing to take on the biggest bully in the Mid-east playground, and you can't keep giving the bully a free pass."
The danger was growing because Saddam Hussein had wrapped himself in the flag of Islam. Mr Woolsey compared the gambit with
Stalin's tactical exploitation of Christianity during the Second World War. Cementing an alliance with Sunni fundamentalists,
Saddam was successfully invoking the idea of a "new Caliphate". To complicate matters further in the Islamic world, Mr Clinton had
damaged relations with Pakistan by firing missiles at five camps in Afghanistan in an anti-terrorist strike last month. Two of the
camps were training Pakistani guerrillas for operations in Kashmir.
Mr Woolsey said Yevgeny Primakov, Russia's new prime minister, a former KGB boss, was "terrible".
Calling him an antediluvian, "zero-sum" communist, he said Mr Primakov could be expected to "kowtow to the most
unreconstructed elements of the military industrial complex" and would seek to hurt Western interests wherever possible. Mr Clinton
had staked everything on Boris Yeltsin and was now inextricably associated with this grand failure. The risk was that Russia would
turn increasingly nasty and xenophobic.
"I'm troubled by the parallels with the 1930s. I can see Russia playing the role of Weimar Germany," he said, adding that the
Weimar Republic, a democracy under the rule of law, with a viable economy, was in far better shape than Russia today.
"The 1930s were not inevitable, they could have been avoided. But not even Churchill could see what was happening. He was cutting
the Royal Navy budget when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.
"And here we are now, cutting the devil out of our defence budget. We need to be careful." |
