FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER Newt Gingrich said President Clinton should have done more to fight terrorism years ago. And Gingrich regrets not taking the president to task.
“In retrospect, I wish I had been much more consistent in holding President Clinton’s feet to the fire on this issue,” he told The Hill newspaper.
“There was a greater failure to wage a systematic campaign against terrorism at a time when it was obvious that we knew it was real,” Gingrich said, citing the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole last fall.
The Georgia Republican said Clinton clearly understood the terrorist threat but didn’t act on it. It was a “pathetically weak, ineffective ability to focus and stay focused,” Gingrich said, adding the Sept. 11 attacks “probably would have had less chance to succeed if we had been serious about combating terrorism during that administration.”
Such “lack of leadership” left a cleanup job for the current administration. Under President George Bush, “it was pretty clear we were a serious country, and then you saw it just erode for eight years,” he said.
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Bin Laden: ‘He’s very scary’
THESE DAYS, former President Bill Clinton has plenty to say about terrorism and Osama Bin Laden, apparently.
“He’s very scary. He’s smart, he’s rich, he’s ruthless, he’s bold, with a very definite political agenda,” Clinton said at a forum Tuesday, breaking a code of silence that he and other former presidents had adopted in past weeks to preserve national unity.
The terrorists “want us to be afraid of them. They want us to be afraid of the future,” he continued, noting that his administration had thwarted 15 terrorist efforts and that Bin Laden’s agenda targeted Israel, other Arab nations and the US presence in the Middle East.
“Make no mistake about it. This conflict represents a fundamental struggle that will go on for the next few years and will define the soul of the 21st century,” Clinton concluded.
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Buy, and wear, American!
A SHARP-EYED FBI source has noted that Osama Bin Laden wears a $65 Timex Ironman Triathlon watch on his right wrist in his recent videotaped message, seen this week by a global audience. “The arrogant terror chief apparently isn’t so disgusted by our country that he refuses to parade around with one of its best-known products,” the New York Post observed.
“Bin Laden is supporting a wholeheartedly American company founded in 1857. Alas, we may never know the true story behind the watch,” the Post said. “Bin Laden was on the run yesterday, and calls to Timex execs were not returned.”
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Job searching
THE EVER-RESTLESS Bill Clinton is looking for work, reports The Washington Post’s John Harris.
During a recent Kennedy Center appearance with Clinton loyalist James Carville, Clinton joked about running for office in France — where the law allows anyone born on former French territory to campaign for the top job.
“It’s a real job, you know, president of France,” Clinton said. “So Carville and I were thinking of just moving there in a couple of years and running against each other — and then giving the other one a guest room.”
