Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

On another message board I frequent (for discussion of non-political matters), there are some very vocal and very conservative participants -- the type of people who are happiest if they can find any reason at all to both exalt George W. Bush and vilify Bill Clinton in the same post, and double-credit if they can do it in the same sentence. I mainly ignore all of that, because these same people can be quite sensible when discussing that message board's actual focus (film music). But yesterday, one of them commented to the effect that President Bush should get credit for choosing to set aside "Shock and Awe" in favor of the "surgical strikes" we saw, in which our forces attempted to either "decapitate" the Iraqi command, or better still, kill Saddam Hussein in the very first hours of the war. This was contrasted, of course, with the air campaign in Kosovo, when President Clinton directed massive air strikes in an attempt to kill or incapacitate Slobodan Milosevic.

Well, yes, I suppose the current commanders deserve some credit for this. I'm not prepared to give credit to President Bush -- at least not all the way -- for the same reason that I'm not willing to blame Clinton for any civilian deaths in Kosovo. I'm far from a military expert, but I very much doubt that Bush or Clinton -- or any President -- has a direct role in planning military campaigns. This is why they have things like Joint Chiefs and Secretaries of Defense and National Security Advisors. If the President decides to attack, he asks for options from his commanders, they present their recommendations, and then the order is given. While Bush's decision may have been clear -- intelligence provided someone with some information about the whereabouts of some very important people in the Iraqi command, and time will tell if one of them was Saddam himself -- I have a very hard time castigating Clinton for Kosovo, especially considering the campaign there was ultimately a success, if definitely messy.