Bill Clinton: An Analysis - Case Study Example

257592Bill Clinton: An Analysis William Jefferson Clinton became the 42nd president of the United s in 1993 amid the hopes and high admirationof the American public. A natural born orator, Clinton addressed the issues on the campaign trail with confidence and promise. Richard Lowry (2003) writes that Clinton commented on all the hard work of the Clinton administration that had been lost during the Bush Administration (1). Lowry points out that Clinton’s lament of all the good that had been done and lost was really a self-serving lie (1). Lowry is right, as we look back at the Clinton legacy it becomes apparent that much of what is going on in the world right now, began in 2001, just months after President Bush assumed his office, and are the result of unresolved issues that arose during the Clinton Administration. Clinton’s presidency committed some of the most egregious domestic affronts in American history, and his administration single-handedly brought America to its knees on the international political front. His economic NAFTA agreement was replete with self-interest, and opened the doors for American companies to leave the country and leave American workers without jobs. Bill Clinton left office with a legacy in shambles. On the Domestic Front There are three very big and serious issues on the domestic front that rank the Clinton Administration as a presidency that had a gross disregard for the American Constitution. Not only did Bill Clinton lie under oath to a Grand Jury investigating Paula Jones’s allegations of sexual misconduct while Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, but he tarnished the notion of taking an oath and swearing to tell the truth on the Bible. Swearing the oath before the court has probably if nothing else represented a struggle of conscience for people who followed it with a lie. When the president of the United States was found to have taken the oath, and lied, it called into question his integrity as it would pertain to the oath he took when he assumed the office of president. Oaths, it would seem, meant nothing to William Jefferson Clinton. Later, when the scandal about his affair with a White House intern was about to break, the Clinton spin machine went into action and was poised to paint Monica Lewinsky, the young woman with whom Clinton engaged in sexual acts with in the Oval Office, as a deranged and disturbed woman – and then came the news of the “spotted” dress on which was evidence that Ms. Lewinsky was not deranged. People called for Clinton’s impeachment, and it was about at that point that Richard Nixon would have resigned, but Clinton tenaciously hung onto his office (Campbell, Colin and Rockman, Bert A., 2000, 43). Personally, the President of the United States was a disaster, but he insisted the country was never at risk because of his behavior, or because of the time that it consumed in the second term of his administration. Nine months later foreign terrorists who had been in the country more than a year, had trained themselves to fly by taking flying lessons, and they hijacked three commercial airliners. Two of those passenger jets flew into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. One flew into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the third crashed in a Pennsylvania field, but was believed to have been in route to Washington, DC. The Branch Davidians and Elian Gonzales In a place called Waco, Texas, a religious cult came together much in the same way as do other cults. Perhaps there was cause to be worried, some claim there was, but others claim not. There was certainly no cause for the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm agency of the Federal Government to raid the compound dressed in military-style uniforms, armed with a full arsenal of weapons, including automatic weapons and a tank. What they lacked was the Constitutional authority to invade the private compound, but that did not stop them (Barnett, Randy E., 1995, 93). “For example, when A.T.F. agents in military-style uniforms and armed with genuine automatic assault weapons(23) invaded the property of the Branch Davidians in Waco they implicitly made a normative claim that they were acting in a justified manner. It was their claim to be exercising a justified power, as opposed to anyones decision to write an article about this claim, that gave rise to the need to address the normative question of legitimacy. That their acts may have been authorized by the Constitution does not settle the problem of legitimacy, it raises it. For the problem of legitimacy that I am discussing here applies to the Constitution itself.(24) But the normative inquiry does not end there. For those who claim to be empowered by the Constitution make a further claim as well. They claim that you and I are morally obliged (at least prima facie) to obey their commands. It is claimed (and commonly thought) that David Koresh and his followers were not only legally obliged to lay down their weapons in the face of these "agents" of the "duly constituted authority" acting "under color of law." They were morally obliged as well. Their failure to obey is claimed to have been wrongful as well as illegal. Had these invaders been anyone other than the "public officials" they called themselves, the residents of the compound would surely have been justified in defending themselves against such heavily armed marauders. But solely by virtue of the A.T.F. agents claim of legal authority, the normative conclusion is said to be completely reversed. Now those who might otherwise have been viewed as defending themselves from aggression are considered murderers rather than innocent victims of a potentially deadly assault (or would be if they had survived the final conflagration) (Barnett, 93).” A second infringement of the Constitutional protections came during the Clinton Administration when Immigration and Naturalization officers, assisted by a SWAT team, under the orders of the White House, fully armed, raided a private home and detained a five-year Cuban refugee whose mother had drowned in the ocean crossing from Cuba to Florida (Coulter, Ann, 2005, 310). That the child had survived the crossing was miraculous, and he was in the care of legal relatives when the government stormed their home with weapons drawn, and wearing full assault gear they snatched the child from a relative who was cowering with the child in his arms backed up at gun point in a closet (see photos online at http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=elian+gonzalez&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title). The Clinton Administration had shown a blatant disregard for the legal rights of Americans, and short cut the system to achieve their own politically motivated goals. By the end of his second term, Clinton was described by some people, including former staffer Dick Morris, as being morally bankrupt. The International Front Bill Clinton has publicly remarked on more than one occasion that his biggest regret of his presidency is Rwanda. “In the United States, fear of being held to the 1948 Geneva accords on genocide, which required intervention, led spokespersons for the Clinton administration to scrupulously avoid using the term ‘genocide’ to describe what was occurring during those fateful months of 1994. Although one can partly understand the US administration s hesitancy to act in Africa in the wake of the Somalia intervention, which cost the lives of eighteen American soldiers, US inaction, and that of the other developed nations in the world, resulted in the probable deaths of one million Rwandans. 1 But there was something deeper and less savoury behind the inaction. In the minds of many, the Rwandan holocaust was simply African tribalism rearing yet again its atavistic head. There was nothing to be done (Taylor, Christopher, 1999, 4).” In the aftermath of the Hutu massacre of the Tutsi Rwandans, more than a million men, women, and children lay viciously murdered by machete wielding Hutu rebels. Calls for help had gone unanswered, and the world; and the Clinton administration stood by, denying that there was a genocide taking place. Then there was Somalia, where U.S. forces had been stationed as part of a humanitarian intervention force, providing medical supplies and much needed food to the impoverished residents in and around Mogadishu. The Americans had carved out a niche for themselves, remaining close to the shipyards where their supply ships were docking. “The first step in planning for a humanitarian peace enforcement-operation must be the articulation of an integrated humanitarian-political-military strategy that responds to the immediate humanitarian crisis while outlining a longer-term process designed to resolve the underlying political issues that may have brought on the crisis in the first place. These actions must be consistent with international values and standards of conduct. In failed-state situations, or when the functions of a state are sharply curtailed or neutralized, with accompanying wide-scale human suffering, the world must be prepared to offer political and military assistance in an imaginative, constructive, and decisive manner. Political solutions are complicated, elusive, and usually long term; international intervention ultimately is sustainable only when there is an agreed political end result of the intervention (Clarke, Walter M., and Herbst, Jeffrey M, 1997, 3).” Then, the mission changed from a humanitarian one, to a counter intelligence one, and American troops and helicopters were deployed into the zone where there was clan fighting and violence, and the entire situation was one of chaos. Somewhere, things went horribly wrong, and the body of a dead American soldier was shown international news reels being dragged through the littered streets and debris of Mogadishu (Clarke and Herbst, 132). Clinton recalled the troops, and cut off the humanitarian efforts, and thousands of people who had no political allegiance, suffered and died. American troops were humiliated and angry (Bowden, Mark, 2001, Blackhawk Down official web site). Conclusion As much as former President Bill Clinton would like to consider his presidency a success, it was one step from complete disaster. The balanced budget was at the expenses of military equipment, replacement parts, and withholding pay increases to the American armed forces. The first bombing by terrorists in 1998 of the World Trade Center in New York took place in 1998 (Campbell and Rockman, 236). The incidcent evoked a near zero response from the White House. The Branch Davidian Compound and Elian Gonzales were two incidents cites here where there was a questionable abuse of authority. A third incident was Ruby Ridge, where on August 22, 1992, Federal Agents, armed, fired on the home where white supremacist Randy Weaver was holding out against arrest warrants. Weaver’s family was with him, his wife and children. At some point, there was gunfire, and in the end, Weaver’s wife and child were killed (Lexus Counsel Connect, 2008, online). Bill Clinton went into office with the full support of the American people, but he was side tracked by investigations, and his own bad behavior. Clinton’s inability to take his marriage seriously as evidenced by the numerous affairs and allegations of affairs, and then his efforts to conceal his bad behavior when he lied under oath are indicative of a man who is not interested in the rights of Americans over his own interest. The office of the presidency requires a focus, which did not exist in Clinton’s second term because of the many investigations and proceedings. Bill Clinton is as much responsible for the current state of affairs in America as is President George Bush. Works Cited Bowden, Mark. Blackhawk Down: A Story of Modern War. Found online at http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/, retrieved 1 Dec 2008. Coulter, Ann. How To Talk to a Liberal. New York: Random House, 2005. Campbell, Colin, and Bert A. Rockman, eds. The Clinton Legacy. New York: Chatham House, 2000. Questia. 1 Dec. 2008 . Clarke, Walter M., and Jeffrey M. Herbst, eds. Learning from Somalia: The Lessons of Armed Humanitarian Intervention. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. Questia. 1 Dec. 2008 . Corwin, Phillip. Dubious Mandate: A Memoir of the UN in Bosnia, Summer 1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Questia. 1 Dec. 2008 . Lexus Counsel Connect. The Shooting at Ruby Ridge. Found online athttp://www.byington.org/Carl/ruby/ruby1.htm, retrieved 1 Dec 2008. Lowry, Richard. "Naked Ambition: The Clinton Legacy Laid Bare." National Review 27 Oct. Questia. 1 Dec. 2008 . Taylor, Christopher C. Sacrifice as Terror : The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 /. New York: Berg, 1999. Questia. 1 Dec. 2008 . Read More