Life in the rearview mirror
Clinton, as the first post-Cold War president, had a less salutary record in dealing with new global menaces. He did focus intensely on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he misjudged the true intentions of Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian leader saw the Oslo peace accords not as a means to a two-state solution but as a means to the substitution of a Palestinian state for the State of Israel. Clinton simply couldn't believe that Arafat meant this when he said it and so stood by while Arafat violated most of the essential elements of Oslo, inciting Palestinians to hatred while erecting and empowering a murderous terrorist network. Thus it was that Clinton's last-gasp efforts to broker an agreement at Camp David, while obviously well intentioned, came to naught.
As for the rest of the record, Clinton, wracked by scandal, lacked public, media, and congressional support and failed to rouse the country to confront the threats he understood we faced, especially from terrorism. Instead, military and intelligence services were downsized; nuclear dangers from threats like North Korea and Iran were barely contained rather than confronted; and Afghanistan, largely ignored, became the training ground for the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor.
My Life, in the end, is not so much a memoir of what was but a tantalizing reminder of what might have been.
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