Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton appears as a president whose administration’s power is measured not only by the force it used, but by the cooperation it refused and the consequences it left in its wake. In Noam Chomsky’s account, Clinton’s government rejected Sudanese intelligence offers before the September 11 attacks, continued to support Indonesia during the violence in East Timor, and defended a policy that reserved the United States’ right to act unilaterally. The portrait is less a personal biography than a record of decisions and institutional continuities, set against the human costs they produced.

Presidency and the Uses of Power

Clinton’s administration is presented as operating within familiar political pressures. Chomsky argues that governments answer to powerful domestic constituencies while also responding to popular opinion; in a crisis, officials may use public attention to advance a broader program. He describes the prospective agenda as including militarization, missile defense and the militarization of space, reductions in social programs, and measures that would shift more wealth toward a small number of people. The proposed political consequence is diminished public debate and a society more readily subordinated to government priorities. This is Chomsky’s analysis of the administration’s likely course, not a claim that each item was enacted as a direct consequence of one decision by Clinton.

That framework informs the account of Clinton’s foreign policy. In 1993, he told the United Nations that the United States intended to act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary. The formula, Chomsky emphasizes, did not originate with the later Bush administration: Madeleine Albright reiterated it as ambassador to the United Nations, and Defense Secretary William Cohen restated the reliance on unilateral military power in 1999. The declared policy gave international cooperation a place, but only conditionally; the government retained the final judgment about when its own action was necessary.

Sudan: A Rejected Offer and Its Consequences

The most consequential episode connecting Clinton to the September 11 attacks is the administration’s refusal to cooperate with Sudan. Immediately before the 1998 missile attack, Sudan held two men suspected of involvement in the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and notified Washington. U.S. officials later confirmed that Sudan had offered assistance. The United States rejected the offer; after the missile attack, Sudan released the suspects in anger. They were subsequently identified as agents of Osama bin Laden.

Chomsky cites reporting that the refusal was not simply a failure to act on an available offer. According to FBI reports described in the cited account, the FBI wanted the men extradited, but the State Department declined. A senior CIA source characterized the refusal and the rejection of other Sudanese proposals as an exceptionally serious intelligence failure. Sudan had offered information about Osama bin Laden and more than two hundred Al-Qaeda figures, including files with photographs, biographies of senior members, and information about the network’s financial interests in different parts of the world. The source argued that the material could have improved the chances of preventing the September 11 attacks. Chomsky presents that conclusion as an informed assessment, not proof that the attacks would otherwise certainly have been prevented.

This intelligence episode is set beside the destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in August 1998. Chomsky challenges a narrow accounting of the bombing that counts only people killed immediately by missiles. He argues that the consequences also include deaths caused by the loss of medicines and the interruption of relief efforts. The factory produced 90 percent of Sudan’s most commonly used medicines, supplied affordable drugs and veterinary products, and could not readily be replaced through imports because sanctions restricted access to pharmaceutical supplies. A report published a year after the attack described increasing deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases, with tens of thousands—mostly children—suffering and dying.

The disruption extended beyond the factory’s production. Human Rights Watch reported that United Nations agencies based in Khartoum evacuated American staff after the bombing, as did many other relief organizations, delaying aid efforts for an indeterminate period. One affected project served a town where more than fifty people from southern Sudan were dying each day. The United Nations estimated that 2.4 million people in parts of southern Sudan faced the risk of starvation, and warned that interruption of relief could precipitate a severe crisis. Chomsky further cites reporting that the attack halted movement toward a compromise among Sudan’s warring parties, obstructed a possible peace agreement, and weakened a shift in the Sudanese government toward pragmatic engagement with the outside world and away from support for terrorism and radical Islamist influence.

For Chomsky, the contrast between the factory’s destruction and the later refusal of Sudanese intelligence is central to evaluating responsibility. He argues that the human toll of the bombing should include foreseeable deaths resulting from the loss of medical supplies and aid, just as assessments of crimes attributed to official enemies include indirect consequences. The force of his comparison lies in the demand for consistent standards: institutional and ideological conditions do not erase a crime’s consequences merely because they complicate judgments about personal intent. The account therefore links the bombing, the blocked United Nations inquiry requested by Sudan, and the rejected intelligence offers as connected consequences of policy, while distinguishing documented events from the broader estimate of their cumulative toll.

East Timor and the Limits of Restraint

Clinton’s administration also appears in the account of the 1999 crisis in East Timor. The United States and the United Kingdom continued supporting Indonesia, whose occupation had already eliminated roughly a third of East Timor’s population, according to Chomsky. The support continued into the 1999 massacres. Thousands were killed before the fighting in early September drove 85 percent of the population from their homes and destroyed 70 percent of the country. The administration publicly treated the violence as Indonesia’s responsibility and said it did not want to take that responsibility away from Jakarta.

That position changed after pressure mounted, principally from Australia but also from Americans. On September 8, when the worst atrocities were already known, Clinton faced demands to intervene and stop the killings. A few days later, the administration signaled to Indonesian generals that the situation could not continue. The generals reversed course: despite having insisted that they would never withdraw and having prepared to resist an intervening force, they announced their withdrawal and allowed Australian-led United Nations peacekeepers to enter without opposition from the Indonesian military.

Chomsky treats the reversal as evidence of Washington’s capacity to influence events. If a signal from Clinton could prompt the generals to withdraw, he argues, the United States possessed leverage that could have been used earlier to prevent years of violence. Instead, successive American administrations, joined by the British and others, had provided Indonesia with decisive military and diplomatic support. The account recalls Clinton officials’ description of President Suharto as a friend and points to the continuation of suffering in refugee camps in Indonesian-controlled West Timor. The shift in policy stopped the immediate course of events described here, but it did not undo the deaths, displacement, destruction, or the long period of violence that preceded it.

Multilateralism, Alliances, and Strategic Purpose

The book places Clinton’s approach to international institutions in a longer policy pattern. The administration’s 1993 formula—multilateral where possible, unilateral where necessary—was later echoed by Albright and Cohen. In Chomsky’s reading, this language allowed cooperation without surrendering Washington’s discretion. The later need to assemble a coalition might soften official rhetoric, he suggests, without changing the underlying policy: other governments could be expected to support U.S. action, but not necessarily to share in making it. He argues that the United States continued to reserve the right to act as it chose while avoiding serious recourse to international institutions where law might require it.

The account also connects Clinton’s record to arguments about military force and credibility. Chomsky says the 1999 bombing of Serbia was presented by Clinton and Tony Blair as necessary to establish the credibility of NATO. He emphasizes that this was framed not as a question of Norway’s or Italy’s credibility, but of the United States and its principal arms client. He sets that episode beside the later bombing of Afghanistan, which he interprets as serving a comparable purpose: demonstrating what the United States could do if others failed to follow the rules Washington set. He explicitly acknowledges that confidential documents are unavailable and presents the proposed strategic purpose as a reasoned inference, not a documented admission of intent.

In this analysis, Clinton’s presidency is not an isolated prelude to later policy but part of its institutional background. The unilateral option had been stated under Clinton before the Bush administration made it more conspicuous; the East Timor episode shows both the capacity to exert decisive leverage and the choice to do so only after pressure; and the Sudan account links force, civilian suffering, and a lost opportunity for intelligence cooperation. The resulting portrait is defined by a recurring disparity: Washington could influence governments and events, yet its stated commitments to multilateralism and humanitarian responsibility did not, in Chomsky’s telling, reliably govern how that influence was used.