WASHINGTON – On Aug. 20, 1998, American Tomahawk cruise missiles hit sites in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The targets of the assault, ordered by President Bill Clinton, were Osama bin Laden and his band of terrorists.
In light of what would happen three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, was prescient. “We are embarked,” she said “on a venture in which we have to deal over the long run with what is the very serious threat to our way of life at the end of this century and the next one.”
One might imagine that Clinton’s decision was broadly popular. In fact, his move was met with an explosion of querulous partisanship. It occurred at the height of the controversy over his sexual relationship with a young White House intern that would, later in the year, lead to his impeachment. Many in the GOP charged that Clinton was trying to distract the nation from his scandal.
Clinton, as John Harris reported that summer in The Washington Post, was accused of “following a ‘Wag the Dog’ strategy – so-named after the recent movie in which a president tries to draw attention away from a sexual scandal by staging a phony war.”
Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., who now serves in President Trump’s administration as director of national intelligence, was one of the skeptics. “After months of lies and deceit and manipulations and deceptions – stonewalling – it raised into doubt everything he does and everything he says,” said Coats. He insisted that “it is legitimate to question the timing of this action.”