When Saddam Hussein attempted to assassinate George H.W. Bush, what was Clinton's response? A cruise missile strike on Iraqi intelligence HQ, _launched at night so that the building would be unoccupied_. What sort of message did that send?
The message "we want to destroy Iraq's Intelligence *infrastructure* (records, computer systems, etcetera) without having to kill *people* as well", perhaps?
Basically, the equivalent of "attack the argument, not the poster".
How about what is, in my opinion, the single largest foreign policy mistake _in American history_ - refusing the offer of the Sudanese government to hand over Osama bin Laden, because the Clinton Administration felt that we didn't have enough evidence to try him? This was raising incompetence to an art form, with tragic results.
If at the time the US government believed they didn't have enough evidence to put Osama bin Laden on trial, then refusing the offer was a sensible approach. Why bother to have someone handed over to you, if you know you're going to have to release him anyway? He would have been a security risk while in custody, and his release would have been exploited as a PR stunt for and by the Taliban: "See, even the evil USA cannot touch us!".
Looking back and saying "we should have done <this-or-that>" is pretty useless; you can't travel back in time and do things differently. In retrospect, it might also have been a good idea to have Hitler assassinated right after he got elected -- but we can't travel back in time and kill him, thus possibly preventing WW2 from happening.
As the song goes, "There's no use crying over spilled perfume".
Jeroen "Political Observations" van Baardwijk
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