Shahzada Yaqoot

Grand Canyon University:

His-450

April 8, 2023.

Dr. Cliff McCain

Clintonomics

On their arrival at the white house to start their administration, President Clinton and Vice Preside Albert Gore started on various financial reforms. Clinton picked over one hundred young baby boomers to run key positions in his administration. He also appointed women on important positions reflecting the influence of his wife Hilary Clinton the most powerful first lady of all times.  The unemployment was running at 7%, and with private sectors unions becoming ineffective the unemployment wasn’t improving. Furthermore, many manufacturers opted for offshore manufacturing to become more competitive in facing Pacific rim Countries. US manufacturers had to make radical management changes to eliminate middle management jobs, and to stress their employees for higher efficiency and outputs.  Under this administration in 1993, Congress enacts a five-year fiscal plan designed to fix the economy. The plan raised upper- level taxes from 31% to 36% on the rich while easing off on the lower income tax payors. A five-year plan introduced many other programs including North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that allowed its three partners, Mexico, United States, and Canada to freely trade and move their goods within the three countries (Klein, L. R. (1994, March 1).

Clinton also introduced GATT which lowered tariff on manufactured goods and eased off on the import tariffs on goods exported from the Pacific rim countries. At one stage Clinton had to resolve a problem with Japan, who was restricting the sales of American automobile parts in Japan while dumping their cars into the US markets. Clinton threatened to increase tariff on the import of these cars to make them lose their market in the US.  Japan had to agree and allow US to sell parts in Japan. Clinton also handled gun violence by increase budget allocations for the law enforcement agencies. He sanctioned 30 billion dollars to expand and strengthen the law enforcement forces. President Clinton then embarked on overhauling the health insurance for 45 million uninsured Americans. He wanted to make it mandatory for the employers to provide 80% of the premium costs for their employees. But those unemployed were to be covered by State or Federally contracted HMOs. The cost of such a complex program was estimated at about 100 billion dollars that Clinton hopes to retrieve by taxing the tobacco Industry. All these measures of Clintonomics only improved a little of the economy and a slight unemployment rate.

Mid-term Election of 1994

The mid-term election of 1994 was plagued with many scandals of the Clinton administration. With Republicans controlling the congress and the senate, the conservative republicans attacked Clinton by digging at his private life and old financial dealings going back to his day of Arkansas’ governorship. The White-gate scandal that was linked to some land development deal Clinton did, Travel-gate that was about firing of some Whitehouse employees, the file gate, a scandal about destroyed files related to White-gate scandal, and then there was Trooper gate where an Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, alleged that a state trooper took her to a hotel room where Clinton solicited a sexual act with her. 

All these scandals led to a panel of federal judges appointing an independent investigative committee headed by Kenneth Starr, chief solicitor of the Bush era, to dig deep into this scandal to find the truth. Kenneth Starr vested with investigating authority, a large staff, and unlimited funding went after Clinton like a hawk. Another group of conservatives led by a young republican Newt Gingrich, went after Clinton to expose of his scandals. Newt Gingrich composed a document “Contract with America,” which was a concise document describing the Conservative major foreign and domestic policies, balance budget, taxes, welfare reforms, legal reforms, and defense spending. 

In view of these rising pressures around him. Clinton pivoted by going far from his liberal colleagues and their welfare programs. He became more of a Centrist and started please both the conservatives as well- as the people in need of welfare.   Conservatives didn’t buy his appeasing methods and kept pressurizing more to curb welfare reforms and to back off from government spending. They coined a term “tax and spend” to describe the democratically controlled congress.

The 1994 election was also significant because Republicans were able to take full control of the Congress and the Senate (Owens, J. 1998). With both houses under their control the conservative, with 73 young conservators most with religious affiliations became more aggressive. Their leader Newt Gingrich was chosen as the speaker of the house. With such political strong hold of the Republicans Clinton had to be on his defensive. He agreed to curtail or amend many welfare programs that he had promised during his election campaign. Twice he had to veto Republic budget proposals that would defund social programs. Many government entities that were funded through these programs suffered and had to be shut down partially.

This angered the public and public opinion started to sway towards the Clintonomics. Within two years Newt Gingrich was forced to give up on his agenda. The Republican Congress then accepted Clinton’s proposal. The two sides compromised and worked on several social programs with bipartisan consent.

 Balkan War of the 1990

The Balkan wars refer to the biggest war in Europe since World War II. President Clinton’s was pretty much unaware as to what was going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It started as an ethnic fighting among the Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, and Croats which had resulted in over 100,000 deaths and displacing 3.5 million people as refugees. Bosnian Muslims were the victims of arms embargo thus being unable to self-defend against the Serbs, and Croats. It was fall of 1995 when US got when the Assistant secretary of State Richard Holbrooke brought heads of the three warring factions to Dayton, Ohio for a conference. The three parties agreed to obey a cease fire and cooperate in a complex peace plan involving some 60000 NATO forces of which 20000 were Americans troops, to be stationed in Bosnia to monitor the cease fire and help work of further resolutions. It worked for a year but later it became complicated, and the American troops had to stay back. Then a war broke out in nearby Kosovo, Yugoslavia, where about 1.8 million Albanians resided forming region’s biggest population.

In 1991 Kosovo Liberation Army was founded to seek independence from Yugoslavia. KLA militants started targeting Serbian soldiers and police stations in Kosovo. In 1998 the KLA waged a fully-fledged war, the Serbs retaliated.  UNO forces headed by the American forces were unable to implement the cease fire mandated by the Dayton agreement. 

In 1999 General Wesley Clark, head of the NATO forces escalated the Ariel war to force Milosevic to sign a pact that he had been refusing. Milosevic did not care and doubled up on his ethnic cleansing project. This led to a crisis for millions of refugees.  The NATO forces kept their air strikes to weaken Milosevic who finally signed an agreement slightly different that the one he had always refused. In the long run the NATO air-strikes did not avail much for Americans who had started to dislike the war. President Clinton’s administration called the war a humanitarian effort. In the process about 300000 people had died and 3 million people were displaced. The cost of the Balkan war exceeded 30 billion US dollars. It was a war that America won, but the price was high.

President Clinton’s impeachment

President Clinton presidency was plagued with many scandals emerging in the early days of his office. First there was Whitewater gate in which president Clinton’s land development deal during the time of his governorship of Arkansas, the case became more viscous when the files related to Whitewater gate (dubbed File gate) were mysteriously missed from the Whitehouse. He also had to face scandal Fliergate when some Travel staff in the Whitehouse were fired. Troopergate that involved a state employee alleging that she was picked up by an Arkansas State trooper and taken to a hotel room where Bill Clinton prospected for a sex with her also became a hot and touch subject. And then there were fundraising scandals where the president was alleged to misappropriate election campaign funds.  A special counsel Kenneth Starr was assigned by the Federal judges to investigate the scandals (Popp, K. A. 2000).

In January 1998 all these scandals were dwarfed by a revelation that Clinton had a sexual relationship with a young Whitehouse intern Monica Lewinsky of Beverly Hills California. Kenneth Starr who was already investigating Clinton for three years now convened a grand jury on the 27 of January 1998 to investigate “Monica-gate.” President Clinton was questioned on live national TV he looked into the camera and pointing his index finger stated, “I did not have sex with that woman “Monica Lewinsky.” Thereafter, he refused to answer any questions from the press and kept quiet. Kenneth Starr investigated further and called in many witnesses including Ms. Monica Lewinsky herself, who stated that she did have sex with the president.

Clinton’s rating started to fall while his lawyers tried to stop key witnesses being called in to testify before the grand jury. On July 17th, 1998, Kenneth Starr subpoenaed Bill Clinton to come and testify against the charges of misconduct, breach of trust and misuse of his power before the grand Jury. Clinton agreed on responding to it from the Whitehouse in the presence of his attorneys. In his short speech he conceded that he did have an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky. 

The American public in general did not care at all and opined that Clinton’s personal life issues were of no significance and were no ground to impeach the president. The public loved the President because he had done a great job in running the country by balancing the budget, improving trade relationships, maintaining a cordial foreign policy and bring the unemployment rate down at home. However, Kenneth Starr was able to prove that Bill Clinton had committed perjury, tempered with the witnesses, interrupted justice, and had abused his presidential powers. Bill was later impeached, however the public favor he had won saved him from being removed from the office. Later the senate voted to acquit president of all his wrong doings. He continued successfully leading the country for the rest of his term.

Discuss Operation Iraqi Freedom

There is a long history related to the Operation Iraqi Freedom.  In the war of the 80s between Iraq and Iran, America acted as a spectator that helped both sides to stop either side winning. Iraq a major oil producer among the Gulf countries had become military strong by amassing weaponry. America initially thought of Iraq as a counterbalance to stop Iran from becoming a regional power. After 8 years of war, both Iraq and Iran were exhausted. Smaller Arab countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had bankrolled a lot of war expenses for Iraq during its war with Iran. However, at the end of the war, Saddam Hussein refused to pay back any of his debts. In August 1990 he attacked and captured Kuwait. This was a blatant act of war. Kuwait sought American help for liberation. President Bush (senior) orchestrated an international coalition of American, British, European, and Arab nations to wage a war against Iraq (Dursa, E. K., Barth, S. K., Bossarte, R. M., & Schneiderman, A. I. 2016).  After the ultimatums to withdraw from Kuwait were ignored by Iraq, a fullfledge war was declared. Initiating from the borders of Saudi Arabia, Iraq was attacked by coalition forces led by the Americans. First a heavy bombing inside Iraq destroyed most of its infra-structure, latter the ground forces made their attach and within hours got deep into Kuwait. The 33 days old war then destroyed all Iraq forces who were compelled to surrender or retreat.  Kuwait was liberated and it was celebrated as a victory for American forces.

President bush did not eliminate Saddam Hussein at that time. The reason was that most Arab countries wanted an independent Iraq to exist in its weakened state. America put an oil embargo on Iraqi oil to further choke it from earning revenues that would allow a rebuilding of military arsenal. Latter Iraq was allowed to sell “Oil for food” to selective buyers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t properly monitored, and Iraq started selling oil to open market buyers earning revenues that primarily went into Saddam’s bank accounts. 

Saddam was alleged to re-amass weapons of warfare including chemical weapons. Then came the 9/11 mishap and America was left wounded.  Evidence showed Iraq linked and harboring Al-Qaida operatives. The American president had vowed to bring Osama Bin Laden the master mind behind the 9/11 attack, to a quick justice. Furthermore, the intelligence reports confirming Iraq amass Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) became the premise of going to war with Iraq. Furthermore, America wanted to expand its war to curb “rogue nations” in the region and wanted the regime change in some of those countries. Iraq was the first target for several reasons that included (1) Saddam’s as a threat to Arab Nations, (2) to bring democracy for Iraq and let its people flourish, (3) To possibly reach an Arab-Israel relational settlement, and (4) to secure an oil source for America and the Western world. After seeking world consensus to wage a war against Iraq, America was ready to attack. China, Russia, and France did not support the war, and millions of people around the world protested in the streets of cities like London, Rome, and even parts of United States opposing US to go to war with Iraq.  However, Iraq’s continued refusal to allow UN inspectors to inspect Iraq’s facilities to verify of WMD were voluntarily destroyed.  While the nations against the war kept protesting and asking for more time to inspect WMD, Gen. Colin Powell announced that America with its willing partners will launch an attack on Iraq.  President bush gave an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that he and his two sons should leave Iraq. Saddam ignored the ultimatum and in result the US mission to change Iraq’s regime started on 17th of March 2003. President Bush addressed the nation of his initiation of mission “Iraqi Freedom.”

References

Klein, L. R. (1994, March 1). Thoughts about Clintonomics. Atlantic Economic Journal, v22(n1), 64.

Owens, J. (1998). The importance of candidate characteristics and local political conditions in the 1994 US mid-term elections. POLITICAL STUDIES, 46(4), 766–776.

https://www.balkanhistory.org/balkan-wars-1990s.html

Popp, K. A. (2000). The Impeachment of President Clinton: An Ugly Mix of Three Powerful Forces. Law and Contemporary Problems, 63(1/2), 223–243.

Dursa, E. K., Barth, S. K., Bossarte, R. M., & Schneiderman, A. I. (2016). Demographic, Military, and Health Characteristics of VA Health Care Users and Nonusers Who Served in or During Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2009-2011. Public Health Reports (Washington, D.C.: 1974), 131(6), 839–843. https://doi-org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.1177/0033354916676279