By Cecilia Keehan
Eleanor Clift wears many hats, one of which is as a reporter on the White House and presidential politics for Newsweek magazine. In this capacity, she is thoughtful and takes time to be precise and accurate.
Her other life is as a panelist on the syndicated McLaughlin Group. In an address to the Morning Forum of Los Altos last Tuesday, she called it “the granddaddy of combative TV shows.”
She quipped her tombstone will probably read: “Please let me finish.”
She said President Bush had set a perfect pitch in a sad time with his address to the Congress and the nation. Although the President started tentatively, she said he realized he had to take on a role of inspirational leader and he began to emerge as one. She is most reassured by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presence on the presidential team.
Referring to the Soviet defeat after 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, she recalled the words of Colin Powell, who said, “We do deserts; we don’t do mountains.”
She cautioned that the collapse of the Taliban will mean the emergence of the Northern Alliance, a group she finds not much better than the Taliban, and one that makes Pakistan nervous.
When the Reagan administration was arming the Afghan mujahideen, Reagan was warned by Benazir Bhutto that they were creating a Frankenstein. When the Soviets left the country in 1989, the United States cheered the end of the Cold War.
The 160-pound, 6-foot-5-inch bin Laden is the father of more than 10 children, Clift said. Two who are around him have orders to kill him if he is about to be captured. He is the 17th of 52 children and comes from a wealthy family, she said. “It was as though a Rockefeller had become a Communist.”
Clift listed the acts of terror attributed to bin Laden, which included the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993; his involvement in Somalia, where American soldiers were dragged through the streets; the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole; and now Sept. 11.
U.S. responses to these events were tentative. We sent cruise missiles into a Taliban training camp, but they missed bin Laden. We bombed a baby food factory where bin Laden was reported to be housed, but he was not there.
Would it make any difference if bin Laden were captured? Clift said we have gotten our wake-up call. “What does bin Laden want?” she asked. “He wants the Afghanistanization of the Arab world.” And he conveniently uses Israel as a tool.
Clift was concerned about religious fanaticism, which is growing on a scale the world hasn’t seen since the Crusades. Timothy McVeigh, she said, was surrounded by religious fanatics. In Israel a fundamentalist Jew killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and in our own country anti-abortionist conservatives bomb and kill medical personnel in clinics.
Finally, touching on the area she had been scheduled to speak on, she said the one area that is going to be profoundly changed is the effect on women politicians in the United States. After Sept. 11, Clift said, the prospects for women in politics have dimmed and a woman as president will remain a novel idea. She claimed that several women had been planning to run next year, but due to these events there is no longer a welcoming political atmosphere for them.
Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series held at the United Methodist Church of Los Altos. To get on a waiting list for membership, write to Morning Forum, P.O. Box 274, Los Altos 94023-0274.
