U.S. Air Raids Necessary

Osama bin Laden, the multimillionaire Saudi Arabian terrorist, has not been coy about his murderous intentions. He has declared a jihad, a holy war, against the United States and instructed his followers that they have a religious duty to kill Americans wherever they are. The seriousness of that threat does not need underscoring. In the last week, mounting evidence has linked Bin Laden to the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In the last few days embassy personnel and other Americans in Albania, Pakistan, Jordan and a host of countries in Africa have been alerted to the dangers they may face.

On Thursday, the United States responded to this peril with cruise missile attacks on Bin Laden’s sprawling headquarters in Afghanistan and on a chemical facility in Sudan described by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen as capable of producing materials to make the deadly agent VX. The attacks were both punitive and preemptive, retribution for the Aug. 7 bombings of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa as well as a blow to disrupt preparations for any further attacks. President Clinton, who gave the order for the attacks last week, said Thursday that they came in the face of “compelling information” that additional terrorist acts were imminent. Bin Laden’s recent comments leave no reason to doubt the threat.

Skeptics almost immediately raised questions and in some cases expressed the darkest suspicions about the president’s motivations in ordering the raids at this time. Politically wounded, facing the possibility that he may be unable to complete the remainder of his term, Clinton has inevitably been seen by some as a man desperately seeking to reassert his leadership by recourse to force. Probably the public will think better of his leadership for his having ordered an operation that most Americans--including some of his bitterest congressional enemies--support.

But let there be no illusions about the lasting political effect of this action. Thursday’s operations will not be the salvation of Clinton’s presidency. Carrying the war against terrorism to the lair of the terrorists will not make the Monica Lewinsky scandal go away or spare Clinton from the potentially dire political and legal consequences of his reckless personal behavior.

We have been critical of the president’s refusal to candidly acknowledge the full extent of his misbehavior and deceptions in the Lewinsky affair. We have been dismayed by his unimpressive attempt to apologize while still spreading the blame around for the lies he told over the last seven months. Those lies helped needlessly prolong a costly and sordid investigation by a prosecutor whose zeal was fueled by the president’s increasingly less credible denials. And we have been deeply concerned that the president’s preoccupation with the personal mess in his life is distracting him from dealing with urgent international challenges.

With that said, and based on what is so far known, we strongly support Clinton’s determination to demonstrate that terrorists can have no sanctuary. American officials have called the attacks an exercise in self-defense. That is an apt and properly limited definition. The raids will not put an end to Bin Laden’s plots. But they do serve notice to countries that are friendly to terrorists, as both Sudan and Afghanistan are, that their support is not cost-free. The attacks were necessary and appropriate--timely evidence that the military reach of the United States is long and that its knowledge of terrorist hiding places and activities can be exact and devastating.