Bill Clinton | Page 2 | Discovery Institute

Wall building with bullet holes from Bosnian War period in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

^{Bruce Chapman
December 1, 1995
Citizen Leadership

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Clinton risks leading us into quagmire of ‘Vietnam II’

_{Bruce Chapman
December 1, 1995
Citizen Leadership

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Vietnam started, too, with limited purposes in service of a universal goal (containing communism, in that case.) And it ended with a goal of merely getting our prisoners home - and with years of disillusionment. President Clinton, who cut his political teeth on opposition to the war in Vietnam, has learned some of the lessons of that conflict, but not the most important one: Don't send troops into a war unless you have a way to win and get out. Yes, of course, "peace enforcement" is not war, supposedly. But it also is not mere "peacekeeping," and in Bosnia even the latter resulted in the deaths of more than 200 United Nations troops. When the president says that the United States mission "may well involve casualties," and that if U.S. troops are attacked "they will have the authority to respond immediately and . . . with overwhelming force," what then follows, if not war? In explaining to the American people and Congress why he had avoided direct intervention earlier, the president said, "I decided that American ground troops should not fight a war in Bosnia because the United States could not force peace on Bosnia's warring ethnic groups: the Serbs, Croats and Muslims." Just so. But why does he think he has "forced" that outcome now, when the Bosnian Serbs are still uncommitted and when whatever commitments are made on paper mean so little in the Balkans anyhow? There have been 34 "truces" and "cease-fires" and other "agreements" before this one, and none has held up. What enables peacekeeping is a manifest and genuine desire for peace on all sides or, even better, the defeat and disarmament of the aggressors. Is someone planning to go door to door to disarm the Bosnian Serbs? Read More ›

railway accident presented using wooden toy train

^{Bruce Chapman
September 29, 1995
Citizen Leadership

5}

Public needn’t fear budgetary ‘train wreck’ rhetoric

_{Bruce Chapman
September 29, 1995
Citizen Leadership

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The noise you hear coming from Washington, D.C. is not the screeching prelude to a budgetary “train wreck.” It’s only the noise of a rhetoric wreck. There is nothing at all unusual about the failure of Congress and the President to reach agreement on a budget by the formal deadline, October 1 (this Sunday). And the “crisis” over the debt Read More ›

Bronze figurine of Lady Justice with her scales

^{Bruce Chapman
November 25, 1992
Citizen Leadership

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Ethic Cleansing

_{Bruce Chapman
November 25, 1992
Citizen Leadership

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The Clinton honeymoon is hardly underway and the Society of Permanent Busybodies is already questioning the integrity of his Transition Committee. They want to know: How can Vernon Jordan, former head of the Urban League and co-chair of the transition, presume to give advice on presidential appointments when he serves on the board of a tobacco company? About the time Read More ›