No Opportunity

World Trade Center 1993

After The Big Guy had been in office for 13 months and a few days, the World Trade Towers (a pair of very tall buildings in New York City) were rocked by a truck bomb that caused extensive damage. Although subsequent investigations have linked the bombing to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, all that was known for certain at the time was that it was the handiwork of an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist named Rahmann who was upset with the U.S. for some reason. Since Rahmann was visually challenged, allowances had to be made. Besides, the victims of the bombing were 1,000 Wall Street fatcats who were only injured anyway. Thus, the President had no real opportunity to take action, which probably explains why he never even visited the site to take a look at the damage.

Somalia, October 1993

About eight months after the WTC bombing, U.S. troops on a peacekeeping mission in Somalia were ambushed by troops belonging to a Somali warlord named Aideed. According to the Washington Post:

"Somalia has been a center of al Qaeda activity since 1993, when bin Laden sent several top lieutenants to provide assistance to Mohamed Farah Aideed, a local warlord. Aideed's forces killed 18 U.S. Army troops serving in a U.N. peacekeeping force in a firefight in October of that year. Television images of an American body being dragged through the streets of the capital, Mogadishu, shocked the Clinton administration and precipitated its decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from the country. After the U.S. withdrawal, al Qaeda members continued to use Somalia as a regional base of operations..., according to U.S. intelligence officials and court records."
Of course, there was no way for The Big Guy to know that U.S. troops had been killed with the help of Bin Laden and al Qaeda functionaries—at least not until many months later—which meant that there was no opportunity to take military action, because the only dead Americans on the scene were soldiers who had disobeyed orders by embarrassing the administration. And as shocking as it was to see their bodies desecrated by Third World enemies, it's important to see the other side of the situation too. As it turned out, the best thing to do about the Somali disaster was nothing, except maybe a little restrained consoling of the Americans back home who were upset about it.
 
 

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, November 1995

The next thing that happened was hardly anything at all, because it was just a little bomb that killed five American servicemen at a training facility in Saudi Arabia. Heck, you can lose more troops than that in a helicopter accident. There were hardly even any pictures of what happened, and so what opportunity did the President have to make a big deal of it? Those are the breaks. So what if Bin Laden had something to do with it? It's not the Big Guy's fault he's such a piker.

Dharan, Saudi Arabia, June 1996

There was this housing complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, where a bunch of American military personnel were living—until 19 of them stopped living because Bin Laden or somebody bombed their highrise. It's a tricky situation. Nineteen is a big enough number that you could get a little upset about it, but then maybe people would ask, 'Why are you upset about this when you didn't get upset about the Riyadh thing last year? Five dead doesn't bother you, but nineteen does?' So, you see, any opportunity there might have been is compromised right at the start, and the only thing there really is to do is nothing. Of course, it's sad and all, but what can you do?

Tanzania & Kenya, August 1998

This next one sounds as if it might have been an opportunity for some big time leadership, but it really wasn't. On August 7, 1998, Bin Laden's guys blew up two U.S. embassies at the same time. All told, 224 people died, including 12 Americans. All those dead foreigners were really a shame, but Americans aren't going to stand for going to war over that, now are they? And the 12 dead Americans were also a shame, but the total was actually lower than the death toll in the Dharan fiasco where the Big Guy didn't do anything at all. And worse than that, the timing was just awful, coming at a critical point in the legal proceedings surrounding the Monica problem. Sure people criticized him for doing nothing except lobbing a few cruise missiles into Sudan, but think what the Republicans would have said if he'd tried to do more than that. They'd have accused the President of trying to start a war to distract attention from his sex life. And just who is it that really cares about our two-bit embassies in places like Kenya and Tanzania anyway? Ninety-nine out of a hundred Americans couldn't even find Kenya and Tanzania on a map. It just wasn't an opportunity. Not really.
 
 

USS Cole,Yemen, October 2000

Yeah, sure, it was a direct attack on a U.S. naval vessel. Yeah, it's true that 17 sailors died. But it was October 2000, for Christ sake. A few weeks before the election. No President in his right mind would have gotten all fired up about Bin Laden then, and reminded everybody about the seven years of not doing anything about Bin Laden that preceded this particular incident. So it's much much better not to say anything, really, and just look sad instead. Really sad. And if you're having a hard time looking sad, then think about the really tremendously great opportunity the next President is going to have when Bin Laden does something like this again...