Clinton's secret wars : the evolution of a commander in chief / Richard Sale.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [459]-464) and index.

Pt. I. The Transformational President -- Pt. II. Forward to Baghdad -- Pt. III. A Special Kind of Evil: Al Qaeda in the Balkans.

"When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, the main criticism of his qualifications was his lack of foreign policy experience - something on which he was tested immediately upon taking office. Nearly a decade after his presidency, Clinton's record as a military leader remains a hotbed for debate. Now veteran journalist Richard Sale provides the first book devoted to our forty-second president as commander in chief." "In the final eight years of the twentieth century, the nation and the world witnessed pivotal, world-defining events. The situation in the Balkans, where the area fell victim to the horrors of ethnic cleansing, and the Middle East, where the menace of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, loomed and al-Qaeda was building its plans, proved to be daunting challenges for the new president. Although the popular assessment of the Clinton administration was that it was largely ineffective in the realm of foreign policy, Sale uncovers a much more interesting and complex story: that of a young president who learned from his initial missteps and evolved into a tough-as-nails world leader. The author gets beneath partisan rhetoric and shows how Clinton, driven by a pure hatred for treacherous leaders and brutal regimes, launched covert ops (about which nothing has been reported in the mainstream media) that extradited war criminals, toppled Slobodan Milosevic, and narrowly missed getting Osama bin Laden."--BOOK JACKET.