Berger Cops the Plea

After a little hiatus, Boldtalk is back.

Just recovering from a long bout with the flu, I almost fell into relapse when I read about Berger getting a slap on the wrist. This is a clear case of noblesse oblige, the right that politicians exercise to commit huge lapses in judgment. Neither party has an interest to do anything serious lest they set a precedent that bad behavior might actually receive serious punishment. For some, Sandy Berger was just "sloppy" or at worst was just trying to avoid embarrassment by destroying a critical memo. For me, that's what makes it so bad. That a former National Security Advisor would be willing to commit a felony just to cover his abysmal record. What he wanted to do was to be able to go around telling everyone how he and the Clinton Administration had done everything to go after Osama Bin Laden but he couldn't weave these lies with an accusatory document hanging around.

Would it have been so bad to just tell the truth? There were already plenty of other documents extant that told the true story. At a time when the country needed honesty, desperately, people like Berger think only of their own narrow interest. The truth is that Clinton's Administration did not go to any great lengths to get Osama. From my reading, I am convinced that Clinton himself wanted Osama dead but his advisors, Berger and Albright, were more concerned about taking too many chances and raising the ire of the Europeans, who repeatedly urged the US to deal with Osama by not mentioning his name. Berger could have told the 9/11 commission how he doubted they could have done much to get Osama with the Europeans so unwilling to help.

We might have even persuaded the 9/11 commission to look deeper into the role of Europe in the creation of terrorists. It's highly disturbing to me that we've hardly broached the subject with Europe that these terrorists that killed 3,000 of our citizens were not created in the Middle East but rather found their obscene calling in Europe, where anti-Americanism is rampant and where Arabs are made to feel like second class citizens.