Did those nefarious "right wingers" oppose Clinton's pursuit of bin Laden?

Jonah Goldberg unearths a National Review (dead tree edition) editorial and other press reports from 1998 ...

NR & Bin Laden 1998

Bill Clinton in his interview today seemed to be suggesting that conservatives uniformly opposed and denounced him when he launched his "wag the dog" strike in 1998. For the record, here's the NR editorial in response to the attacks, dated9/14/98:
COMEDY Central's The Daily Show called it "Operation Desert Shield Me from Impeachment." Funny, but too cynical. The U.S. missile strikes against terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan were a response to a real threat: They targeted the operations of Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind who, according to U.S. intelligence, was responsible for the brutal bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and was plotting further attacks on Americans.

Congressional leaders were therefore right to support President Clinton's action. The last thing Republicans should do is add to the inhibitions and hesitations of an Administration congenitally averse to the forthright use of American military power. The White House's blatant exploitation of the crisis for its own political purposes-dragging Mr. Clinton back from vacation for a portentous Oval Office address to the nation-should be a source of amusement only. Richard Nixon, too, tried to claim indispensability for his foreign-policy expertise-a much more valid claim in his case, and at the height of the Cold War to boot. It didn't help him.

Launching 75 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the training camp in Afghanistan and the chemical-weapons plant in Sudan was, by Clinton standards, a strong performance. In June 1993, responding to an Iraqi assassination attempt against ex-President George Bush, Mr. Clinton launched 23 cruise missiles at a military-intelligence headquarters in Baghdad-in the middle of the night, so that no one would get hurt! This time, the strike in Afghanistan was aimed at a gathering of terrorist leaders reported to be taking place on that day. Admirably cold-blooded, that.

Bin Laden, the terrorist kingpin, is a new phenomenon, but we should not exaggerate either his novelty or the difficulty of defeating him. (There is a canard that he is an American creation. There is no evidence that he is. He did win his spurs in the Arab world's equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade-the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan-but U.S. money and arms went to the Afghan freedom fighters through the Pakistani military.) While he is a freelancer, bin Laden is dependent on the support of renegade governments, such as Afghanistan's and Sudan's, against which we have leverage. We can target his physical assets by military or covert means and his financial assets through other controls (as Mr. Clinton has also done). His Islamist revolutionary ideology is increasingly discredited in the Muslim world, even in Iran. Defeating him will take time, but it will be done.

Wag The Dog (1) Cont'd
Wag The Dog (2) Cont'd
Wag The Dog (3)Cont'd

Nice try, Joy Boy.

This is what a loyal opposition looks like.