More and more is being made of the story of how Sudan offered to turn over Osama bin Laden to the United States in 1996. There’s been much foolish Monday-morning quarterbacking questioning various errors the Clinton administration allegedly made in counter-terrorism policy. And as a Clinton loyalist I’d be more than happy to point out how this Sudan story is just another example of that. But I can’t. Because it’s not. This really was a missed opportunity of immense proportions.
But it’s easy to draw the wrong lesson from what happened.
The prevailing idea seems to be that the Clinton administration got things wrong because they were too indulgent toward so-called ‘rogue states.’ If you look close at what happened in 1996, though, it’s really more that they were, in a sense, too rough with them. The real story about what happened with Sudan in 1996 is that the folks at NSC were so keen to ‘isolate’ the Sudan (and generally slap them around) that the they were blinded to the fact that this quasi-bad-actor state was willing to do us a very good turn. In a sense, they fell for their own spin.
In our current situation that’s a lesson well worth considering.
Next up, the Richard Clarke angle.
