[mburbank]

I'm sorry, is that more or less enabling then say, selling terrorist weapons systems, or trading them weapons for hostages, or sending brent scowcrof to bring terrorists a cake and a bible, or sending Donald Rumsfeld to convey our warmest wishes to a guy we knew had used chemical weapons on his own people or assisting in assasinations and a coup in Chile, or allowing the Chileans to assasinate people in the united states. Oh, say, maybe it's more enabling than training Latin American death squads at the School of the Americas, or sending death squads buckets of money even after congress passed a law saying not to on account of the death squads? Or maybe selling terrorists weapons to fund death squads? See, it's so hard to tell what's the most enabling thing you can do for a terrorist, or even who a terrorist is. Say, if a ruler isn't a terrorist when we like him, but then he's almost Hitler when we don't? Oh, hey, what about when we sent the aforementined scowcroft to toast the chinese leadership about a month after Tianamen square, or when Bonzo went to Bittburgh and laid a wreath on the tomb of the unknown SS officer? Of course that's a retroactive endorsement of terrorsim, and how enabling is that? Plus, doing something Ellie Wiesel begged you not to do takes balls. Oh, hey, how about this, letting a guy who gave nuclear knowledge to the axis of evil get a pardon and house arrest, do you think that might send an , I don't know, enabling signal to terrorists? Or maybe diverting your armed forces and intelligence away from capturing the man responsible for 9/11 so you can have them go play the hokey pokey in Iraq? That might be called enabling. Or starting the Iraq war? All 16 of our intelligence gathering agencies agree that the Iraq war has strengthened terrorism, who enabled that?

I'm no Clinton fan. But even in modern history, your claim is an arguable opinion at best. And then you get into all the American Presidents who were pro genocide in the name of manifest destiny, or pro slavery. How many slavery advocates and big time Indian Killers got to dine in the whitehouse? How about William Sherman, he of the 'scorched earth policy'? An effective general, sure, but do you want to tell me he wasn't a terrorist? American Presidents haven't just enabled terrorism, they've actively sponsored it. What's terrorism? Killing non combatants speciffically for the purposes of scaring the living crap out of the survivors. You really want to make a case that of all American Presidents, CLINTON enabled that the most?

Truman dropped two atomic bombs on cities! Roosevelt bombed Dresden until there was a firestorm! The main, tactical purpose was to kill enough civillians to scare the crap out of the survivors!

You can pick and choose which incidents of terror you think were worth it, but terror as a tactic is time honored, and Clinton was a piker at enabling it. Now as countries go, we enable far less terrorism than a lot of other countries. But we hold up our end.

I think it's possible that you have just the tiniest case of tunnel vision.