Back in the late ’90s, a rather odd scandal came out of The White House.  Accusations came flying that President Clinton, then a pretty popular President as far as Presidents go, was having an affair with an intern and a cigar.  That in itself was not that big a deal.  Presidents had been accused of having affairs many times before.  However, because Clinton had apparently made it a habit in the past, it was coming back to haunt him legally.  In a separate case, he testified that he did not have sex with the current affair.  Since that wasn’t good enough, he went on tv, as the President, to announce it publicly:

He even got his wife to go on the warpath as well:

Then it became obvious he had.

Exit Hillary from the scene.  Other minions immediately picked up the chorus of “It’s all about sex” responding to anyone suggesting the fact that Clinton was damaged goods.

At about the same time, the United States was prosecuting the masterminds behind the 1993 World Trade Towers attacks.  In retaliation to those investigations, and prosecuting the perps behind the Embassy Bombings, a fellow rose to prominence, Osama Bin Laden.  He immediately shot to the FBI Top Ten list.  Clinton approved kill orders in early 1998.  Several times over the next year he would supposedly have Bin Laden in his cross hairs.  Only one time would he pull the trigger.  The policy-wonking Clinton had put such stringent guidelines on when to pull the trigger that it became almost impossible.  So, the one time they did pull the trigger, they were done from a far distance, with less than reliable cruise missiles.  President Bush would use that one later.  The missiles missed their mark.  The problem was tactical:

They had to shoot from the Arabian Sea, several hundred miles, into terrain that looked like this:

Good luck with that.

Only months before, a movie came out that was kind of popular:

It was about a president caught up in a sex scandal that needed a distraction.  So, a war was “created”.  In this case, it was purely fictional.  ”Wag the Dog” became a term for creating a conflict to distract from a scandal.  Although a great plot, it was a common feeling that Clinton was going to do something to get everyone on his side against Kenneth Starr investigating the sex scandal.

So, by the time Clinton actually did pull the trigger on his policy-wonked attack on Bin Laden, it was pretty much destined to fail, and the politics were set that it looked exactly like he was wagging the dog.  He was wide open for criticism domestically, and internationally.  Militarily, Clinton was crippled from that point on.  The attack on the USS Cole would be Clinton’s going-away present from Bin Laden.

Less than one year later, Bin Laden would attack again.

What if Clinton had not policy wonked national security and actually gone in and taken out Bin Laden when he had both the reason, and the political backing, to do it?  What would the world be like today if 9/11 had never occurred?

Tags: 9/11, cigar, clinton, conspiracy, dress, hillary, it's all about sex, lewinsky, president, right wing, uss-cole, vast, wag the dog, wonk, world trade towers