Jul 13 2007
BILL CLINTON: FIRST NEOCON PRESIDENT
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By Peter Chamberlin
7/13/07
Bill Clinton seems to get blamed by this Neocon administration for many things, but most of all for “losing bin Laden.” The ugly truth is that, in this case, they are probably right. Clinton’s team probably had good information on Osama’s whereabouts most of the time, since they were playing on the same team for most of Clinton’s two terms. It is becoming clear from the accumulating evidence that Bill Clinton resurrected Ronald Reagan’s Afghan strategy of using Islamist guerillas as his own covert foreign policy in Europe and other intransigent hot spots that seemed to be immune to normal diplomacy. Clinton’s foolish toying with Islamist killers is probably the spark that ignited the international jihad against America.
Those of us who are diehard “Bush haters,” like to blame Bush senior for creating Al Qaida, when he abandoned Afghanistan. The problem is, even though Bush did abandon the Afghans, it fell to the next misled president to breathe life into Al Qaida. According to Gen. Hameed Gul (former head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence-ISI- during the war against the Soviets), when Vice President George H. W. Bush became president in 1989, he threatened to “clip ISI’s wings.” (Gul now serves as an adviser to Pakistan’s extremist religious political parties. He may also be the source of the Al Qaida rumors that it was the Israeli Mossad, not bin Laden, that carried-out the 9/11 attacks, as well as the idea of creating an Islamic Caliphate, beginning with Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics.) After the withdrawal of the Soviets on February 15, 1989, Bush began to make good on that threat. According to author George Crile, in Charlie’s War, on September 30, 1991, the end of the fiscal year, the flow officially stopped (except for $200 million [matched by the Saudis] hidden within the defense authorizations bill for 1992). After the US abandoned Afghanistan, to attack Saddam Hussein, the ISI was left alone to manage the Afghan tribal bloodbath and civil war. Soon after the liberation of Kabul, their man, Hezb-i-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (long the main recipient of CIA weaponry) started the civil war, by firing rockets at Kabul. (The ISI later created the Taliban regime and installed them in power in 1996.)