312 a short history of the united states
White House, a battle Clinton had clearly won. But many conserva-
tives did not forgive Gingrich for failing to stand his ground and for
not refusing to concede.
With a booming economy, falling deficits, and his wise move toward
a more centrist political position, Clinton was reelected to a second
term in 1996 over Senator Dole, a wounded veteran of World War II
who ran a lackluster campaign. Ross Perot was nominated by a much
shriveled Reform Party and mustered only half the support he had
enjoyed four years earlier. Clinton polled 45 , 628 , 667 popular and 379
electoral votes to Dole’s 37 , 869 , 435 popular and 159 electoral votes.
Almost all the electoral votes for Dole came from the South and
mountain states of the West.
In foreign affairs, Clinton showed an unsteady hand. Like his pre-
deces sor, he both dispatched troops to Somalia as part of a peacekeep-
ing operation, and then abruptly withdrew them when a dozen or more
American soldiers were killed. He did help broker an agreement be-
tween the Israelis and Palestinians to allow Palestinian self-rule in the
Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but these efforts failed to achieve peace
when extremists on both sides kept up their shooting and killing on a
regular basis.
When communist- controlled Yugo slavia split into fi ve inde pendent
nations, Bosnia, one of the five, and ethnically and culturally divided
between Christian and Muslim, erupted in a bloody civil war. Pursu-
ing a program called “ethnic cleansing,” the Christian faction in Bosnia
massacred or deported Muslims. To help bring an end to this
bloodletting and stop the fighting, Clinton committed U.S. troops to a
NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia in 1995.
What remained of Yugo slavia sought to put down a rebellion of eth-
nic Albanians in Kosovo who were seeking inde pendence. Slobodan
Milosevic, the president of Yugo slavia, responded with brutal force,
whereupon in 1999 an expanded NATO that now included Poland,
Hungary, and Czech oslovakia, began a massive bombing campaign
against Yugoslavia’s military bases and brought the fighting to an end.
Milosevic was later tried by an international tribunal for his crimes, but
he died in prison before the final verdict could be rendered by the court.
Clinton did display a degree of determination and courage in foreign
affairs when he threw his support behind a North American Free