In the spring of 1996, the White House was preoccupied with Bosnia-implementing the Dayton Agreement, ferrying American troops across the Sava River, building facilities at Tuzla, attempting to install an unworkable three-headed government in Sarajevo, hoping to persuade Muslim, Croat and Serb factions to let refugees return to their burnt-out homes. Bosnia may have been important to the confidence of Europe and the credibility of NATO-but everything is relative. On the same White House watch, a far more important war was left unattended: We let Osama bin Laden escape our clutches.
Barton Gellman's astonishing account of White House decision-making, featured in the October 3 Washington Post, laid out a sad Clintonian story of too little, too late. It is a story that bears important lessons for the conduct of the present campaign against terrorism. Well studied, it is a lesson that can teach us to avoid the dangerous confusion between war and peace, and between adjudicative fact-finding and the conduct of a serious foreign and national security policy. It is a lesson that, despite the shock of September 11, we still need to learn.
In February 1996, Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Othman Taba asked the U.S. ambassador in Khartoum what the Sudanese government could do to redeem its heretofore indulgent record on terrorism. Ambassador Tim Carney and State Department official David Shinn laid out a series of sensible demands, including the expulsion of a group of Egyptian nationals conspiring to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak, and the closure and dismantling of Hamas training facilities that readied young men for Palestinian terrorist operations. At the top of the list, however, was the request to put an end to the swaggering presence in Khartoum of Osama bin Laden, who even then was notorious for bankrolling a number of Islamic terrorist groups around the world.
