Media coverage and person-on-the-street interviews have been rife with speculation that Bill Clinton timed his attack on alleged terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan last Thursday to distract attention from his Troubles With Monica. That's exactly backward.

According to Secretary of Defense Cohen in his post-attack press conference (at which the media's elite once again distinguished themselves for sheer spinelessness and gee-whiz gullibility for the deployment of expensive, deadly toys), the attacks were ordered by Clinton and had been planned for at least a week prior to the 20th. That would mean Bill Clinton's sudden weekend decision to address the nation and "come clean" (well, sort of) regarding his behavior--that decision was made with the full knowledge that the U.S. would be launching an international military operation within days.

In other words, Clinton may or may not have attacked two countries to distract us from his troubles--we'll never know. But we do know that his August 17 speech to the nation, in which he made possibly career-threatening admissions, was timed so that it would be wiped off the front page shortly thereafter.

There are any number of other aspects to this affair that stink. As Maria Tomchick pointed out in ETS! prior to the attack last week, the target, Saudi arms merchant Osama bin Laden, is yet another CIA progeny. When is it going to occur to our army of self-righteous Beltway pundits that the best way to stem future terrorist attacks on "innocent Americans" (or anyone else) is to abolish the CIA?

Was this bombing an assertion that U.S. leaders have the unilateral right to attack, without critical challenge from domestic politicians or media, anybody they want, anywhere in the world, so long as they claim that the target is sufficiently heinous?

As with the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986, media faith that the U.S. had located and punished the right culprit for a terrorist act was touching, if naive. (In the case of the Libya bombing, the U.S. and its "irrefutable evidence" later turned out to be wrong.) Where is the evidence? Why were most U.S. allies noticeably silent on the wisdom of the U.S. action? What about civilian casualties--seemingly inevitable in Khartoum, where dozens of missiles were launched into a residential neighborhood? Media reports ignored it. Media reports also casually accepted as just another government the legitimacy of the Taliban, bin Laden's protectors in Afghanistan, whose brutal fundamentalism has been made possible by (among others) the CIA and Unocal. (ETS! #2-33, April 28, 1998.)

Accepting the premise that Clinton timed his mea culpa to be swept off the front page also means that, as Commander-in-Chief, he then had a strong incentive not to back down on attack plans--if, for example, questions came up about bin Laden's culpability. That gives the U.S. a particular responsibility to lay out its case against bin Laden. The original timing of the attacks may not have been related to the Lewinsky affair at all--but once Bill went on TV Monday, he was committed to it as a damage control plan.

In the end, bombing a training camp (others can be built) and a factory (ditto) will do little to prevent terrorism, by individuals or by rogue countries like the U.S. The net effect is to guarantee hundreds of millions of dollars in future Pentagon budgets for replacement missiles, and to provide political cover for Bill Clinton during a rough week. One wonders--at this writing, nobody has bothered to report--how many people in two countries died for a boost in Bill Clinton's daily polls. That's a cowardly, terrorist act on Clinton's part, at least the equal of the original embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.