HE WAS ONE of us, I always say, a child of the '60s and '70s, an antiwar protester, an idealist, and very clever to boot. Moreover, he knew poverty and family hardship firsthand. It was in his soul to try to make the world a better place, you would have thought. But he blew it, for himself, his country, and all of us. If an artist were commissioned to paint the eight years of the presidency of Bill Clinton it would be a landscape of missed opportunities.
He won the presidency at a time when America was arguably ready for anything. The Cold War that had consumed the energy of a whole generation was over. Major war was a distant memory. America was about to enter a new era of prosperity. He had the great facility of communication, and the American public was prepared to lean over backward to allow this relatively young man to pick up the mantle of the assassinated John F. Kennedy and lead it into new pastures.
He didn't do it. It quickly turned out that he had no vision, no deep convictions, and no overriding purpose. One of his first acts, presumably to quiet the Pentagon, which was nervous and antagonistic because of his dodging the Vietnam War draft, was to launch a cruise missile attack on Iraq. Eight years of bombing Iraq have taken the undermining of Saddam Hussein not one step forward, and the American-led embargo, meanwhile, has created enormous suffering for the ordinary people of Iraq, in particular the children.
A short while after the cruise missile attack he made the decision to pull American troops out of Somalia, where they were supposed to be part of a United Nations peace-keeping force. In fact they had operated independently under the direct authority of US Southern Command in Florida and had decided to engage in combat with one of the rebel leaders in a very non-UN way. It led to the deaths of 18 American soldiers.
Instead of taking the blame himself, Clinton turned on the UN. For the rest of his term the UN has remained the bete noire of much of the American public, an easy target for Senator Jesse Helms, who has tried to starve it of US funding. This should have been the era of the UN coming into its own with the Security Council working in harmony, as the charter mandated, to end ''the scourge of war.'' Ironically, there was more of this under his predecessor, George Bush, than there was in Clinton's own administration.
Indeed, substantive progress in building a sane and sober relationship with post-communist Russia occurred more under Bush than Clinton. Under Bush there was serious nuclear disarmament. Under Clinton, as former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev recently observed, ''disarmament moved further during the last phase of the Cold War than during the period at its end.''
For all Bush's conservatism there was no indication that he had serious thoughts of expanding NATO up to the frontiers of Russia. Yet, in an effort to woo Polish, Baltic, and other East European votes, Clinton promised to do - and did - exactly that. As George Kennan, the great Russian expert and former ambassador to Moscow, has observed, ''It was the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.'' From then on the relationship with Russia was doomed to be an uncertain and difficult one; before the United States had had the chance of making Russia a real friend, even a part of the Western world.
Even modest steps forward to cap the nuclear genie came to naught. Clinton lost the Senate vote on ratification of the Test Ban Treaty, an American initiative and a key element in forestalling nuclear proliferation, because he left it to the last minute to campaign publicly for it. It fell between his open fingers much to dismay of his Western allies and added to the widening malaise that said in effect, ''If the West is not interested in taking serious steps toward nuclear disarmament, why should we?'' India and Pakistan's decision to go openly nuclear owes much to the climate of opinion that Clinton's lack of activity on nuclear issues engendered.
It was the same at home. A run of appalling murders in schools by pupils toting guns should have sparked Clinton into action. He should have told the American public that this was the last straw, that the gun lobby had gone too far, and that it was time to join the civilized consensus in the rest of the West and disarm at home. After his 1996 reelection he had nothing to lose. He could afford, if necessary, to be unpopular.
But then he would have to have been a different kind of character. As Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Greenberg says, ''Clinton has gone through life careless about other people. He has no moral compass. There is a lot of sentimentality in the man. He can be sentimental about others, but he's mainly sentimental about himself.''
Now it's goodbye to President Clinton. It should not be a fond farewell. The great historical opportunity that was open to him was squandered. Our generation's big chance to build a better world was frittered away.
Jonathan Power is a columnist based in London.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
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