Bush Decision on Loans a Mistake, Says Democratic Candidate Clinton

President Bush’s decision to link guarantees for $10 billion in immigrant resettlement loans for Israel with the Middle East peace process was a decision that may have been made at the cost of long-term goals in the region, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton said here Thursday.

Clinton, a Democratic presidential contender, characterized the president’s decision to defer consideration of the Israeli request until January as a mistake.

American presidents should be “very careful” when weighing the cost of short-term goals against the results they hope to achieve in the long run, he said.

In this instance, Clinton said, the long-term goal of achieving peace in the Middle East may have been undermined.

In his remarks to an audience of the New York Metropolitan Region of the American Jewish Congress, Clinton was critical of the president’s implication that Israel should be thankful for the assistance of U.S. troops during the war in the Persian Gulf. Rather, the governor said, the Americans and the United Nations should be grateful for Israel’s restraint.

“If Israel had been unleashed, there would have been no Saddam Hussein,” he said.

Clinton, whose decade in the governor’s seat gives him a solid background in domestic issues, highlighted health care, education and economics in his speech.

He was critical of the administration’s assertion that the Americans must turn to their respective states — and Bush’s “thousand points of light” — rather than to the federal government, for assistance.

The president’s projected attitude is one that says, “America’s problems are not my problems,” Clinton said.

Clinton, one of six major Democratic candidates for president, was the first to speak in the AJCongress presidential forum series.