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Clinton recently announced that he could outperform President Bush
at handling terrorism: "I feel I would be better trained for
it, more prepared," he said, according to the New York Post.
His speech
to students at Georgetown University yesterday , however, shows
why this is not true. The main problem is not the lines for which
he has been criticized — the ones in which he was taken to
be suggesting that the West had received its comeuppance on September
11 for slavery, the Indian wars, and the Crusades. In context, all
Clinton appears to be saying is that 1) these events could be seen
as examples of terrorism, 2) we are still paying a price for them,
as when bin Laden uses the Crusades as a propaganda point against
us. These points are arguable. Clinton uses a definition of terrorism
so loose, for example, that he at one point suggests that it is
terrorism when some drunken loser beats up a gay guy. And his version
of collective historical guilt is noxious. ("Those of us who
come from various European lineages are not blameless," he
says-as though any student in today's academy could imagine otherwise.)
But Clinton didn't make excuses for terrorism.
His speech
even had some good points: Clinton endorses the use of computers
to track the comings and goings of foreigners to the United States,
and he recommends the latest book by Hernando de Soto, the evangelist
of property rights in poor countries. (As this review of the speech
suggests, it was rambling in the typical Clinton manner.)
The real trouble
with the speech is its overemphasis on the need "to reach out
and engage the Muslim world in a debate." There is no question
that the war we are in includes a cultural and intellectual component
— a propaganda war, to put it crudely. But from Clinton's speech
you would think that all the war involved was talk: an international
version of his "dialogue" on race. What Clinton will apparently
never understand is that there are some problems you can't talk
your way out of.
(Read a previous
Washington Bulletin on Clinton's post-September 11 comments here.
Recommended Reading
Salon.com interviews Daniel
Pipes on radical Islam in the United States.
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