WAG THE DOG WIGGLES THROUGH THE TIMELINE: A FREEPER REVISITS THIS TIMELY WEBSITE

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[RaceBannon]

Due to the 9/11 commission telling [people that there was no WAG THE DOG scandal, I think it is time we re-printed what a Freeper compiled several years ago.

I downloaded the pages off of Wayback Machine.

[RaceBannon]

War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
     - John Stuart Mill

Those that say that the actions of the Commander in Chief are just and right may be correct.  However, fact and circumstance of the actions of our President provide a correlation that cannot be ignored.  Do not be swayed by the opinions of others.   Seek the truth.  Actions speak louder than words.  Knowing how one has acted can tell you volumes more than anything they will say to you. 

Here are the facts linked to the indisputable spectrum of time.  Decide for yourself the intention and motivation behind the action.  No claims are made here.

Before you are the facts as understood at this time.  Please contact me if any of the information presented is disputed or inaccurate.  I only seek to present the truth. 

Below a table is presented.  Three columns provide detailed data.  A row represents a moment in time, a specific day.  A Willie's Wiggles is the day during which information about a Clinton scandal was disclosed.  Wag the Willie states the foreign policy action taken by the United States government.

These are the facts: don't listen to the fiction.  Use your mind don't be blind.

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Date	Willie's Wiggles	Wag the Willie
November 1996 Day before the election	5th, The Presidential Elections - Bill Clinton wins despite a late rally and a final grueling 96-hour campaign tour by Robert Dole.	4th, Two U.S. F-16 pilots fire missiles at Iraqi radar sites near the 32nd parallel in the southern no-fly zone.
Saturday, Jan. 17, 1998	Lewinsky Scandal Breaks
January 26, 1998	Denies ever having any relationship with that woman, Monica Lewinsky	Clinton intensifies U.S. pressure on Iraq to open all sites, warning Saddam Hussein not to ``defy the will of the world.''
February 23, 1998		Annan and Iraq sign a deal allowing full access to suspected Iraqi weapon sites. New conditions are added to where UNSCOM can go.
June 30, 1998	Tripp first testifies before the grand jury. U.S. District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright ordered Mr. Clinton’s deposition in the Paula Jones case to be made public.	F-16 fighter fires a missile at an Iraqi surface-to-air missile battery in southern Iraq after Iraqi radar locks on four British patrol planes. Iraq denies any aggression.   The first time since jets did so in November 1996.
August 5, 1998		Iraq announces it's cutting ties with weapons inspectors, saying it sees no move toward lifting sanctions. It leaves long-term monitoring in place.
August 6, 1998	Lewinsky Testifies Before Starr Grand Jury
August 17, 1998	President Clinton's admission of an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky
August 20, 1998	Monica Lewinsky testified before the federal grand jury and described how the president had encouraged her to continue denying the relationship and to submit a false affidavit. NYT breaks story about Gore's fund-raising memo.	Clinton ordered the attack on “terrorist facilities” in Sudan and Afghanistan.
August 26, 1998	Starr report to allege Clinton power abuse	Scott Ritter quits UNSCOM Sudan indicts Clinton as a war criminal
September 21, 1998	Starr Delivers Report to Hill Monday,
Wednesday, Sept. 9, 1998	Tripp-Lewinsky Phone Tapes Released
Saturday, Oct. 31		Iraq suspends all cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors. The United States and Britain warn Iraq of potential military action to force cooperation.
November 13, 1998	Clinton settled the lawsuit with Ms. Jones by paying her $850,000 Judge Starr delivered to Congress an additional 4 boxes of evidence against Clinton
Saturday, Nov. 14, 8 a.m.		Clinton orders a massive strike against Iraq
Sunday, Nov. 15, 3:00 a.m.		Clinton calls strike off.
Tuesday, Nov. 17, 1998	Impeachment Hearings Begin Starr to testify
Friday, Dec. 11, 1998	The Committee Votes
December 13, 1998		President Clinton issued a highly classified order to the Pentagon on Sunday morning that began a 72-hour countdown to the air assault on Iraq.
December 15, 1998	CLINTON TOLD ON AIR FORCE ONE THAT HE CURRENTLY DOES NOT HAVE THE VOTES TO DEFEAT IMPEACHMENT IN THE HOUSE.	Clinton makes final decision to undertake military action after he had holds a discussion aboard Air Force One [Tuesday] with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a half-dozen members of Congress who traveled with them to the Middle East."
Wednesday, Dec. 16, 1998	Impeachment Eve	President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair order ``a strong, sustained series of air strikes'' to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
Saturday, Dec. 19, 1998	2:21 PM ET Clinton Impeached on 2 out of the 4 articles.	Pentagon To Recommend End Of Iraq Strikes - Officials 5.38 p.m. ET
January 14, 1999	Trial begins in Senate	Iraq is bombed through out the trial
March 23, 1999	Nato begins the Kosovo Crisis	Two days later the Cox Report was to be released. Its release is suddenly delayed.

 

 

Costs Associated with US Military Engagements
Cost of Gulf War to US	$7.4 billion
Iraqi Build up 91-11/98	$7 billion
Desert Fox	$1 billion
Bosnia	$9 billion
Kosovo	$13 billion
Cost of Cruise Missile	$1 Million aprox.
Aug 20	100 Missiles
Dec 16	400 Missiles
Costs Associated with Starr Investigation
Lewinsky Investigation	$4.8 million
Starr Investigation	$40 million

[RaceBannon]

Wag the Dog Wiggles
Through the Timeline
November 1996
ABCNews.com 8/31/96 Saddam sends Iraqi forces into northern Iraq, capturing a key city inside the Kurdish “safe haven” protected by U.S.-led forces.
ABCNews.com 9/3/96-/9/4/96 "U.S. ships and airplanes fire scores of cruise missiles at military targets in a move to punish the Iraq military and discourage it from following Saddam. Clinton extends the southern no-fly zone to the suburbs of Baghdad."
Electronic Telegraph 9/4/96 Hugh Davies "ROBERT DOLE, the Republican Party's presidential candidate, scrambled yesterday to counter an expected surge in the popularity of President Clinton for confronting Saddam Hussein with military action. All he could think of was to urge the leader to increase the pressure on the Iraqi dictator. He trusted that the missile attacks marked "the beginning of decisive action" to curtail Saddam's power. Mr Dole was shackled by his past as a Senate leader who has never questioned the President during an operation abroad. A grumpy Mr Dole made a point of ignoring the role of Mr Clinton, even though the President had mentioned George Bush's Gulf war leadership. Mr Dole declared that he stood "four-square" behind the US military. "America and its allies can no longer tolerate Saddam's repeated attempts to erode the restraints placed on his regime and to violently assert his authority." The Republican's problem is that the operation, as planned at the moment, is virtually risk-free for Mr Clinton. Few US casualties are expected as no ground action is being considered. The outcome, of course, could be a bombing in America. The FBI is certain that Saddam was behind the World Trade Centre explosion in New York. But so far Mr Clinton seems to be sitting pretty. A Gallup poll yesterday, taken before the air strikes, gave him a 21-point lead in the presidential race...."
The New York Times, Sept. 11, 1996 -- Iraqi forces fire a missile at two F-16s in the northern no-fly zone. The United States responds by sending more bombers, stealth fighters and another aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf region. Iraq accuses Kuwait of an ``act of war'' for allowing U.S. jets into Kuwait.
The New York Times, November, 1996 -- Two U.S. F-16 pilots fire missiles at Iraqi radar sites near the 32nd parallel in the southern no-fly zone. (The day before the election)
Electronic Telegraph 11/04/96 Iraq denies jet incident, IRAQ is denying Pentagon reports that a US F-16 fired a missile at an Iraqi radar site after the jet was targeted in the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. A Foreign Ministry spokesman described the report as "absolutely baseless" and part of "American-style electioneering".
Electronic Telegraph 11/05/96 Stephen Robinson "AMERICA votes today in an election that seems certain to return President Bill Clinton to the White House for another four years.Unless every opinion poll proves to be wrong, Mr Clinton will become the first Democrat to win two terms in office since Franklin Roosevelt. The President appears to be heading towards victory despite a late rally and a final gruelling 96-hour campaign tour by Robert Dole, the Republican contender. The final opinion polls showed that Mr Dole had reduced Mr Clinton's once huge lead. But the White House entourage remained confident as the President wound down his re-election effort. Most polls showed that the lead was more than 10 points, narrowing slightly...."
Electronic Telegraph 11/27/96 Christopher Lockwood "IRAQIS danced in the streets yesterday at the news that the first step in ending the country's international isolation, a limited oil-for-food deal, had been agreed in New York..."
The New York Times, Oct. 7, 1997 -- U.N. arms inspectors tell the Security Council that Iraq still refuses to disclose full details of its banned weapons programs and is imposing restrictions on the inspections.
The New York Times, November, 1997 -- Iraq orders American weapons inspectors to leave the country immediately, accusing them of spying. President Clinton orders aircraft carrier to the Gulf to join a military force already in place.
Las Vegas Sun 01/13/98 Mrs. Tripp wears a hidden microphone for the FBI and records a conversation with Ms. Lewinsky.
The New York Times, Jan. 13, 1998 -- Iraq effectively blocks a U.N. weapons inspection team led by an American, failing to provide escorts needed to enter sites.
ABCNews.com 01/14/98 Lewinsky hands Tripp a three-page document of "talking points," the last contact between the women.
ABCNews.com 01/16/98 Prosecutors approach Lewinsky and unsuccessfully seek her cooperation.

[RaceBannon]

Wag the Dog Wiggles
Through the Timeline
June - August 1998
June 30, 1998
ABCnews.com 6/30/98 "Calling her first stint in the witness box “very easy,” Linda Tripp concluded a day of testimony before Ken Starr’s grand jury. She is expected to return Thursday for more grilling. Tripp’s lawyer, Anthony Zaccagnini, told reporters that Tripp seemed at ease as she left the courtroom. “She told me, ‘I find it very easy to truthfully answer the questions posed to me by the prosecutor and the grand jury,’ he said, ‘and that sums up my first day before the grand jury.”..."
ABCnews.com 6/30/98 "In a development in Little Rock, Ark., that could have affect the Lewinsky investigation, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber ordered most of the court filings in Paula Jones’ sexual-harassment lawsuit against Clinton to be unsealed, lifting a gag order she had imposed last fall. The judge kept her order from taking effect for 10 days to give the case’s principals time to appeal. She said a transcript of Clinton’s sworn deposition would be among the documents made public. Lawyers for Clinton had argued that the gag order should remain in place permanently because the materials could be used improperly."
6/30/98 - A US F16 fighter fired a HARM radar-seeking missile at an Iraqi radar site near Basra, after the site locked onto four British jets which were on routine patrol in the southern no-fly zone over Iraq. Concerning the recent firing of a US HARM missile in Iraq, an Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information spokesman claimed that the missile landed in a demilitarized zone near the port of Umm Qasir in southern Iraq where "there was no Iraqi radars or military units."
7/10/98 New York Times A. M. Rosenthal "…On June 13, Butler, in Baghdad, let Iraq know that the laboratory examinations had shown the presence of VX, a poison gas that can kill in minutes with a few drops. For the seven years of the U.N. hunt for Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Iraq swore it had never had any VX or planned for any. 5._On the morning of June 24, Butler reported the VX findings to a closed meeting of the Security Council. 6._That afternoon, Prakash Shah spoke to the Council. He is the Indian that Annan appointed to the new post of his representative in Baghdad. He praised Iraq's cooperation. His speech did not even mention VX. …. 7._The same day, Annan said the U.N. was dealing with Iraq on many issues. He hoped "this particular development" about VX would not destroy the "improved relations" with Iraq… The majority of the 15-member Council are fed up with Clintonian policy that means they lose Iraqi's trade while Saddam gains more power. That includes three of the five permanent members endowed with the veto -- China and Russia, Clinton's newest allies, and France, America's oldest…."
8/3/98 AP "The State Department called the breakdown of talks between Iraq and the United Nations over Iraqi weapons programs disturbing Monday, and blamed the impasse squarely on Iraq. The chief U.N. inspector, Richard Butler, was cutting short his trip to Baghdad following the collapse of talks with Iraqi officials over the dismantling of the Mideast country's weapons of mass destruction, U.N. officials said Monday. .."
August 5, 1998
ABCnews.com 8/5/98 Protesting eight years of crippling economic sanctions, Saddam Hussein broke off cooperation with U.N. arms inspectors today and demanded the commission monitoring the weapons be reorganized. Saddam decided to “completely suspend cooperation with the U.N. Special Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency,” after a meeting with senior officials, a government statement said. The move came hours after Iraq’s 250-member National Assembly voted unanimously to cut off cooperation, demanding an end to sanctions. Legislators complained in a statement that the inspectors would never give Iraq a clean bill of health on its weaponry. Talks broke down Monday between chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler and Iraq’s lead negotiator, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.
August 6, 1998
Fox News 8/6/98 "President Clinton Thursday called Iraq's refusal to cooperate with U.N. arms inspectors ''unacceptable'' and vowed to block any bid to ease sanctions until Baghdad fully complies with inspections. "Unless Iraq reverses course and cooperates fully with international weapons inspectors, the United States will stop any and all efforts to alter the sanctions regime,'' Clinton said in a statement issued by the White House…"
8/8/98 BBC Summary of World Broadcasts "The renewed strained atmosphere between the United Nations and Iraq and the emergence of the KDP [Kurdish Democratic Party] as an element in the United States'plans to topple Saddam have increased the activity in southern Kurdistan. Iraq, which is recruiting soldiers through calls for mobilization, is continuing to amass forces along the border line stretching from Arbil to Dohuk. The KDP, which is trying to improve its relations with the Iraqi government, on the other hand, failed to attain any results from the recent talks conducted by [its leader Mas'ud] Barzani in Baghdad.
8/10/98 James Bone London Times "THE United States is so eager to avoid a new military confrontation with Iraq that it has blocked more United Nations weapons inspections this year than Baghdad. Diplomatic sources say Washington has repeatedly intervened to prevent UN weapons inspectors from mounting what it fears could be provocative searches for banned weaponry, equipment and documentation in Iraq. At one point the Clinton Administration objected to a plan by the UN Special Commission (Unscom) to revisit one of the "presidential sites" that lay at the centre of the last crisis with Baghdad. Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, is even said to have intervened personally to urge restraint in a recent telephone call to Richard Butler, the Unscom chairman… "
Center for Security Policy 8/10/98 "History appears increasingly likely to remember the Clinton presidency as the era in which the world's only superpower lost its grip. As a result in no small measure of Mr. Clinton's fecklessness in the conduct of foreign policy and his misfeasance (if not malfeasance) in providing for the national security, the international environment of Pax Americana he inherited has given way to one that might be characterized as "Pack Up, Americans." …The more telling evidence of the free-fall that has occurred on Mr. Clinton's watch in American prestige and ability to influence -- if not actually to dictate -- international events can be found in the following: Iraq…. In short, so weak has the U.S. position become, so inexorable is the pressure to terminate the Iraqi sanctions regime and, therefore, to pretend that Saddam has complied with his disarmament obligations, that it is now a matter of time, perhaps just weeks, before what is left of the international sanctions start coming undone…Kosovo …The common theme is that, here again, America's adversary is acting with impunity, confident that his friends like Primakov in the Kremlin and Chirac in the Elysée Palace will protect him from any appreciable retribution…Iran…the Clinton Administration refuses to deploy defenses to protect its people against such a threat. Just as it has chosen to ignore evidence of Iranian involvement in the penultimate terrorist attack on U.S. personnel abroad -- the murderous destruction of Saudi Arabia's Khobar Towers, Mr. Clinton prefers to rely upon Primakov's lies that Russia is not assisting Iran's missileers and futile diplomatic efforts to dissuade North Korea from doing so… Thanks to the Clinton team, the precipitous decline in America's credibility and perceived willingness to use its power effectively assures that U.S. citizens and interests around the world are going to be increasingly in peril…
NY Times 8/15/98 Judith Miller James Risen "An Iraqi scientist who defected to the United States has publicly described for the first time the inner workings of Iraq's three-decade effort to build a nuclear bomb. The scientist, Khidhir Abdul Abas Hamza, said that before he fled Iraq in 1994 he helped train a cadre of young scientists who, working with more senior scientists involved in other projects, would be capable of quickly resuming Iraq's atomic weapons program if the United Nations cuts back on its inspections and, ultimately, lifts economic sanctions…"

August 17, 1998
AP 8/17/98 "By changing his story, President Clinton imprinted his presidency with a mark of deception and betrayal of trust. Almost certainly, his confession will erode his credibility. In his unprecedented testimony, advisers said the president admitted to an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky - an admission that puts him in uncharted territory. Presidents don't tell the nation that they lied. They say mistakes were made and pass the blame. Clinton, at the risk of political and legal peril, decided to change his story even though he had maintained a stance of innocence for seven months. Most Americans already felt he was lying. It was a wrenching ordeal that they simply want to forget. It remains to be seen whether they will forgive. The about-face could weaken his hand with Congress, too. But political analysts expect he will survive.... Back in January, Clinton was unequivocal about asserting he did not have a sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. He gathered his Cabinet and assured them the allegations were untrue. Administration leaders put their reputations on the line defending denials that later proved false. ``I believe the allegations are completely untrue,'' Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in January. ``I'll second that. Definitely,'' Commerce Secretary William Daley said. ``Third it,'' said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. ``I think all of them, Cabinet members and staff, have good reason to feel they have been treated badly and unfairly by the president'' said Mann. ``I presume he has an apology to make to them.'' ``I think the public confession could hurt,'' said Columbia University political scientist Henry Graff. ``We're prurient and puritanical at the same time. We're going to have a stained president and a momentarily stained presidency. ``We might want to hope that no international crisis arises in which a badly damaged president has to present himself as commander in chief and order some kind of military action that will require full public support,'' Graff said."
The New American 8/17/98 William Norman Grigg "In a candid summary of his view of executive powers, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein once declared, "Law consists of two lines above my signature." White House aide Paul Begala embraced a similar view of presidential power in his description of Bill Clinton’s intention to rule through executive orders: "Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool." Begala’s flippant soundbite announced the advent of an era, in which a President mired in corruption and politically stymied by Congress rules by decree…"
AP 8/25/98 John Diamond "Drawing a fresh link to an old American foe, U.S. intelligence officials say they believe the Sudanese plant destroyed in last week's missile strike was working with Iraq to make deadly nerve gas. Under increasing pressure to explain why the United States attacked the Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant known for making pain killers and malaria medicine, U.S. officials added the Iraqi connection to previously cited findings that a chemical in soil at the plant is unique to Iraq's nerve gas recipe. The assessment is based in part on intelligence interceptions of phone calls, a U.S. official said Tuesday. U.S. officials now concede their initial justification for the raid -- evidence linking the plant to Osama bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire accused of organizing the Aug. 7 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa -- is less concrete than initially claimed. The U.S. intelligence official, who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, said there is no direct financial relationship between the plant and bin Laden. The embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania killed 257 people, including 12 Americans…."
AP 8/26/98 Nicole Winfield "Incensed that the Security Council has failed to take a tougher stand on the latest Iraqi impasse over arms inspections, Scott Ritter, a controversial American concealment expert on the U.N. weapons inspection team, resigned Wednesday. In his letter of resignation, Ritter singled out the United States for failing to fight for inspectors' unrestricted access to suspected weapons sites. He also accused Secretary-General Kofi Annan of allowing his office to become a ``sounding board for Iraqi grievances, real or imagined.'' …``What is being propagated by the Security Council today in relation to the work of the Special Commissin is such an illusion, one which in all good faith I cannot, and will not be a party to,'' he wrote."
Washington Post 8/30/98 Thomas Lippman about Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright "… Now Albright is paying a price as critics perceive some inability to match her blunt comments with performance and some issues -- notably Iraq -- in which her private diplomacy appears contradictory to stated policy. House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) suggested in a Washington Post interview Friday that Albright may have deceived either Clinton or the public when she intervened with U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq to head off several planned challenge inspections while proclaiming a policy, backed by threats of U.S. military force, that insisted on unfettered access for the inspection teams.
8/31/98 Philadelphia Inquirer Charles Krauthammer "Knowing Clinton, one is tempted to say that if Osama bin Laden thought these missile attacks were bad, wait till Kenneth Starr's report comes out. Might be a good time for bin Laden to go on vacation. Temptation aside, however, it is clear that bombing bin Laden was no Wag the Dog. Defense Secretary William Cohen and Gen. Hugh Shelton would never lend themselves to an air raid whose purpose was to deflect attention from a domestic scandal. Nonetheless, there was an extrinsic force driving the Afghan and Sudanese bombings: the collapse of Iraqi policy. The air raid served to compensate for the total surrender of the Clinton administration in the face of Saddam's determination to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. On the very same day the Tomahawk missiles went out, the United States was forced to support a humiliating Security Council statement that pitiably called Saddam's expulsion of inspectors "totally unacceptable" while pointedly dropping previous warnings of "severest consequences" if Saddam did not reverse himself.
August 20, 1998
NY Times 8/20/98 DAVID JOHNSTON "Justice Department investigators have obtained a November 1995 White House memo with hand-written notations that appear to contradict Vice President Al Gore's account of his fund-raising phone calls during President Clinton's re-election campaign, government officials said on Wednesday. The notations indicate that at a meeting on Nov. 21, 1995, Gore and several campaign officials discussed how some of the large contributions being raised by the vice president for use only for general campaign purposes by the Democratic Party would be diverted to accounts to directly finance the Clinton-Gore re-election effort, the government officials said. The officials would not provide the notations on the memorandum, which they said they had been written by an unidentified senior aide to the vice president. The officials said that the notes were not conclusive evidence of what the vice president knew about fund-raising activities and they did not provide details of the discussion between Gore and others at the meeting. Attorney General Janet Reno has said that telephone solicitations for hard money by the president or vice president were subject to federal campaign finance laws and could be illegal. Last December, she absolved Gore of wrongdoing on the issue of the phone calls, based on what she said was the absence of evidence that he had raised funds for the campaign. The issue of Gore's fund-raising telephone calls is significant because it has emerged as a focal point of debate at the Justice Department in recent weeks, after Reno decided to reconsider whether to seek the appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate fund-raising abuses during Clinton's re-election campaign, the officials said. ..."
CNN 8/20/98 AllPolitics "President Bill Clinton's decision Thursday to order military strikes against alleged terrorist bases in Afghanistan and Sudan received quick, but not universal, support from members of Congress.During a Pentagon briefing on the attack, a reporter drew a parallel between the 1997 movie "Wag The Dog," in which White House operatives orchestrated a fake war to distract the public from a presidential sex scandal....Coats, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement, "While there is clearly much more we need to learn about this attack and why it was ordered today, given the president's personal difficulties this week, it is legitimate to question the timing of this action."... Defense Secretary William Cohen denied the attacks were influenced by the president's troubles. "The only motivation driving this action today was our absolute obligation to protect the American people from terrorist activities," Cohen said. "That was the sole motivation. No other consideration has been involved," Cohen said. Gingrich went so far as to dismiss the suggestions of a diversion as "sick." "I don't think people should think about that at all,"...Much of the lawmaker reaction focused on whether Clinton should have consulted with congressional committee leadership before taking the military action.
NY Times 8/21/98 LAWRIE MIFFLIN After a week of what felt like nonstop talk about sex, ties and audiotape involving President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, television screens were overtaken Thursday by news of a different shock value. When President Clinton announced, just before 2 p.m. ET, that the United States had bombed what he described as terrorist bases in Afghanistan and the Sudan, television news networks shifted into full-tilt coverage of a more conventional kind -- interviewing experts in terrorism, military affairs and politics; showing video of the still-burning building in Khartoum, and carrying the president's formal address to the nation at 5:30 p.m. But the Lewinsky matter was melded into the bombing coverage almost immediately because of the similarity between reality and the recent movie "Wag the Dog," in which a fictional American president fabricated a war to divert attention from reports that he had propositioned a young girl in the White House. The major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS and NBC -- broke into their afternoon soap operas within a minute of each other to carry the president's remarks (CBS was first at 1:45 p.m.), while the all-news cable networks CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel began their coverage at about the same time. The "Wag the Dog" analogy was almost an obsession during the afternoon's coverage. In Washington, two Republican senators, Daniel Coats and Arlen Specter, quickly questioned whether the real-life president was also trying to divert attention from his admission on Monday that he had lied about his sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. On CNN Jeff Greenfield called Coats' remarks "an extraordinary break with tradition" and a "sign of the cynicism" of our times. Others, from House Speaker Newt Gingrich to Sens. John McCain and Orrin Hatch to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, appeared on the various networks to denounce Coats' implication and to urge support of the president. Fox News' White House correspondent, Jim Angle, said it would be difficult, "even if you don't believe the president," to believe that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other advisers would be involved in timing such a grave military operation just to assist Clinton's personal agenda. Tony Snow, the Fox Anchor, replied that if "foreign policy professionals" thought that had happened, "you and I and other reporters would have gotten phone calls by now." CNN had the most dramatic footage of the afternoon, when it relayed not only the video of the rubble-strewn burning building in Khartoum, but the audio of a speech being made by the Sudanese minister of information (with simultaneous English translation), denouncing the attack on what the minister called a pharmaceutical company, and describing Clinton as a man with "more than 100 girlfriends" and "a proven liar." Ms. Lewinsky's appearance before the grand jury Thursday, which otherwise would have been prominent news, was relegated to brief reports near the end of the three broadcast-network evenings news programs. By day's end, the television images of Clinton had again become presidential, as he was seenc interrupting his vacation, striding onto Air Force One to return to the White House, and then addressing the nation in the mode of commander in chief, against a full-dress backdrop of the American and presidential flags. It was a sharp contrast to his dreary demeanor and the somber setting of Monday's confessional appearance.
AP 8/25/98 John Diamond "Drawing a fresh link to an old American foe, U.S. intelligence officials say they believe the Sudanese plant destroyed in last week's missile strike was working with Iraq to make deadly nerve gas. Under increasing pressure to explain why the United States attacked the Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant known for making pain killers and malaria medicine, U.S. officials added the Iraqi connection to previously cited findings that a chemical in soil at the plant is unique to Iraq's nerve gas recipe. The assessment is based in part on intelligence interceptions of phone calls, a U.S. official said Tuesday. U.S. officials now concede their initial justification for the raid -- evidence linking the plant to Osama bin Laden, a Saudi multimillionaire accused of organizing the Aug. 7 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa -- is less concrete than initially claimed. The U.S. intelligence official, who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, said there is no direct financial relationship between the plant and bin Laden. The embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania killed 257 people, including 12 Americans…."

[RaceBannon]

August 26 - November 12 1998
August 26, 1998
USA TODAY 08/26/98 JUDY KEEN AND KEVIN JOHNSON "Independent counsel Ken Starr will hold nothing back when he sends a report to Congress detailing what he believes are impeachable offenses by President Clinton. With his report, Starr intends to send to the House of Representatives reels of audiotape, physical evidence, thousands of pages of grand jury transcripts and Clinton's videotaped testimony, people with knowledge of Starr's plans say. This mound of evidence is intended to back up, or supplement, Starr's report. The sheer mass of the information Starr is preparing to deliver to Congress is intended to show that the independent counsel didn't selectively use evidence, and to avert charges by Democrats that the goal was to damage Clinton politically. Under the independent counsel law, Starr has wide discretion to decide what he sends to Congress. But some lawmakers in both parties have already signaled that they would consider his conclusions less seriously if he sent only portions of the testimony and evidence he has gathered.

AP 8/26/98 Nicole Winfield "Incensed that the Security Council has failed to take a tougher stand on the latest Iraqi impasse over arms inspections, Scott Ritter, a controversial American concealment expert on the U.N. weapons inspection team, resigned Wednesday. In his letter of resignation, Ritter singled out the United States for failing to fight for inspectors' unrestricted access to suspected weapons sites. He also accused Secretary-General Kofi Annan of allowing his office to become a ``sounding board for Iraqi grievances, real or imagined.'' …``What is being propagated by the Security Council today in relation to the work of the Special Commissin is such an illusion, one which in all good faith I cannot, and will not be a party to,'' he wrote."

Mail & Guardian 8/26/98 "THE Sudanese attorney general on Wednesday said the Sudanese government has filed a criminal suit against the United States, naming president Bill Clinton, for last week's missile strike against a Khartoum pharmaceutical factory accused by the US of making nerve gas. Attorney general Ali al-Zaki said that "if a person or an entity fails to show up in court, he will be tried in absentia." Meanwhile, two more victims of the recent US embassy bomb blast in Tanzania have died, bringing the death toll to 12. Another 247 died in the simultaneous bombing of the embassy in Kenya. The missile attack on Khartoum was partly in retaliation for the two blasts."

Washington Post 8/30/98 Thomas Lippman about Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright "… Now Albright is paying a price as critics perceive some inability to match her blunt comments with performance and some issues -- notably Iraq -- in which her private diplomacy appears contradictory to stated policy. House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) suggested in a Washington Post interview Friday that Albright may have deceived either Clinton or the public when she intervened with U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq to head off several planned challenge inspections while proclaiming a policy, backed by threats of U.S. military force, that insisted on unfettered access for the inspection teams. House Republicans recently compiled a list of Albright's statements that they said were designed to mislead Congress and the public about North Korea's compliance with an agreement requiring an end to its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. In the New Republic magazine, editor in chief Martin Peretz outraged Albright and her inner circle of advisers by writing about the Iraq revelations that "Of course, concealing important truths is one of Albright's lifetime habits." That was an apparent reference to the discovery early last year that her grandparents were Jews who perished in the Holocaust, which she said she never knew while being raised as a Catholic. …When CNN learned after the lethal Aug. 7 bombing of the U.S Embassy in Kenya that Albright had turned down an appeal from Ambassador Prudence Bushnell for a new building that would be more secure, Albright aides recognized that such a news story might reflect badly on a secretary of state expressing outrage at the attack and sympathy for the victims. They made the information public in a briefing designed to deflect responsibility away from Albright and onto short-sighted congressional budget-cutters. Independent analysts who fault the administration's foreign policy performance said the responsibility for difficulties in the Balkans, the stalled Middle East peace negotiations, Iraq, South Asia and elsewhere may lie as much with Clinton as with Albright, if not more. They said the president's inclination to avoid confrontation, compounded by the handicap of scandal, acts as a brake on Albright's activism….More criticism came in May, after she delivered what was widely interpreted as an ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: an "invitation" to come to Washington a few days later, conditioned on his acceptance of U.S.-proposed "ideas" for breaking the stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians. Netanyahu refused, and some U.S. Jewish leaders blasted Albright for what they saw as unwarranted pressure on Israel. In the end, while the negotiations that Albright's move was designed to energize resumed, they have not come to the quick conclusion she said she wanted. And the U.S. was perceived as backing down from its challenge to Netanyahu. …But John D. Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, said, "It's pretty evident that there is a pattern of imagining that you can solve everything with statements. Are they prepared to do more than just issue statements?" He was referring to issues such as the conflict in the Kosovo region of Yugoslavia, where Albright said six months ago: "We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with doing in Bosnia." By State Department count, nearly 300,000 Kosovars have been driven from their homes in ethnic violence since she said that, while the U.S. and its European allies have largely stood by. Disagreements over arms control, treaty ratification and the State Department budget have strained Albright's relations with congressional Republicans, despite her stated determination to build good relations with them. On the Democratic side, however, key members

8/31/98 Philadelphia Inquirer Charles Krauthammer "Knowing Clinton, one is tempted to say that if Osama bin Laden thought these missile attacks were bad, wait till Kenneth Starr's report comes out. Might be a good time for bin Laden to go on vacation. Temptation aside, however, it is clear that bombing bin Laden was no Wag the Dog. Defense Secretary William Cohen and Gen. Hugh Shelton would never lend themselves to an air raid whose purpose was to deflect attention from a domestic scandal. Nonetheless, there was an extrinsic force driving the Afghan and Sudanese bombings: the collapse of Iraqi policy. The air raid served to compensate for the total surrender of the Clinton administration in the face of Saddam's determination to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. On the very same day the Tomahawk missiles went out, the United States was forced to support a humiliating Security Council statement that pitiably called Saddam's expulsion of inspectors "totally unacceptable" while pointedly dropping previous warnings of "severest consequences" if Saddam did not reverse himself.

AP 9/3/98 "``The United States has undermined UNSCOM's (the U.N. inspection agency) efforts through interference and manipulation, usually coming from the highest levels of the administration's national security team to include Ms. Albright herself,'' Ritter testified at a joint hearing before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. Democrats tried to block Ritter hearing by invoking a little-used Senate rule that hearings cannot be held after two hours into the Senate session if there are objections. The hearing was set for at 2 p.m. and the Senate had started business at 9:30 a.m. But Marjority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., recessed the Senate, to the hearing could be held without violating Senate rules. He then escorted Ritter into a hearing room where a dozen senators had assembled. All rose and shook Ritter's hand….Albright on Tuesday said that Ritter, a former Marine, ``doesn't have a clue'' about the overall U.S. policy on exposing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. ``It was very sad to hear Madeleine Albright on Tuesday night,'' Ritter said Thursday. ``I do have a clue, in fact several, all of which indicate that our government has clearly expressed its policy one way and then acted in another.'' Calling Ritter ``a true American hero,'' Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., said the former inspector ``has pointed us to a much deeper problem, and that's duplicity of saying one thing and doing something else; that's far more troubling.'' …However, Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware said… ``I respectfully suggest they have responsibilities slightly above your pay grade,''

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AP 9/6/98 Waiel Faleh AP "An Iraqi newspaper that reflects the views of the ruling Baath party warned Sunday that Iraq will take ``necessary action'' if the U.N. Security Council does not lift punishing trade sanctions. The front-page editorial in Al-Thawra did not say what action was contemplated. The paper also reacted angrily to an American and British draft resolution introduced to the Security Council last week. It calls for suspension of regular sanctions reviews until Iraq reverses its Aug. 5 decision to freeze cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors…."

Washington Post 9/6/98 "It's no surprise to find the Clinton administration treating any problem as a public-relations challenge, looking to spin instead of solve, vilifying critics instead of debating them. Even so, turning the dogs loose on Scott Ritter is a new low…. First came leaks about an FBI investigation of Ritter for sharing confidential information with other governments -- something he freely admits he did, as part of his job and at the direct order of his U.N. bosses. Then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright lashed out. Ritter "doesn't have a clue about what our overall policy has been," she told CNN. Claiming great success for Iraq policy on behalf of "the United States -- and, I must say, me personally," Albright nonetheless didn't have enough confidence in that policy to sit by as Ritter testified to Congress. She urged a House committee chairman to squelch one such hearing, while Senate Democrats did their best to prevent Ritter's testimony

WorldNetDaily 9/10/98 ;IRAQ is hiding three technologically complete nuclear bombs and is lacking only fissionable materials to make them operational. This is the view of Scott Ritter, the United Nations arms inspector who resigned on August 26. Mr Ritter made his claim at a recent meeting of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It was published for the first time yesterday by Zeev Schiff, military editor of Haaretz, the Tel Aviv daily. The disclosure, and others about biological and chemical weapons held by Baghdad, came as another showdown between Iraq and the UN loomed

The Pioneer 9/12/98 "It remains to be seen whether President William Jefferson Clinton of the United States is impeached. Even if he is not, the presidency will end for him, whenever and whichever way it does, not with a bang but with a whimper. In fact the whimpering has already started with the man holding what is reputedly the most powerful office in the world appealing piteously over television and radio, for forgiveness and another chance to put his dalliances behind and his presidency and life in order….As for reaction in India, few will shed tears over the exit of a US President whose Administration has been transparently pro-Pakistan on the Kashmir issue and which has persistently refused to condemn Islamabad for its escalating campaign of terrorism against this country. Besides, its blatant assertion that while it had the right to rain missiles on Mr Osama Bin Laden´s terrorist camps, India ought to desist from hot pursuit of Pakistan-sponsored terrorists as that could spark off a war, would be remembered as one of the most glaring application of double standards in the international sphere

Newsweek 9/14/98 Periscope Scott Ritter may not be the last United Nations inspector to quit UNSCOM, the commission charged with dismantling Iraq's biological and chemical arsenal. Other weapons sleuths, feeling betrayed by the cancellation of several surprise inspections this summer, may "throw in the towel," one told NEWSWEEK. Ritter, who bitterly criticized the Clinton administration's Iraq policy as he resigned last month, is now under investigation for allegedly sharing intelligence with Israel. Republicans say the charges are a White House smear. But CIA sources tell NEWSWEEK that the agency, not the administration, raised concerns about his contacts with Israel. The CIA has cleared Ritter, who says he did nothing wrong, but his lawyer says an FBI probe continues.

AP Robert Burns 9/18/98 ;The Clinton administration defended its decision to attack a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan last month and rejected a call by former President Carter to investigate whether the plant really had a terrorism connection. We had overwhelming grounds to strike this facility,'' Sandy Berger, the national security adviser to President Clinton, told reporters Friday when asked about Carter's statements. "For us to have not struck that plant I think would have been irresponsible.''

AP 9/21/98 John Solomon "President Clinton's lawyer cited crises in Iraq and Asia, the legality of Linda Tripp's tape recordings and concerns about grand jury leaks as he declined a half-dozen invitations from prosecutors for the president to testify about Monica Lewinsky. The repeated refusals made prosecutors in Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's office increasingly angry, according to letters that detail a previously secret war of words between Clinton lawyer David Kendall and the prosecutors. ``This exercise ... makes clear that the president has no intention -- and never has had any intention -- of cooperating with this grand jury or this investigation,'' Deputy Independent Counsel Robert Bittman wrote in one letter in April

NY Times 9/21/98 Philip Shenon In an age of satellite television and the Internet, the news of the president's sexual misadventures -- and the cynicism over his motives in conducting foreign policy in light of the scandal -- spread to virtually every corner of the globe in a matter of seconds. In the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, anti-American demonstrators took to the streets the day after the bombings carrying signs that bore cartoons depicting Ms. Lewinsky. Other protesters carried signs with the words "Wag the Dog,".... Biden said he feared that every critical foreign policy action taken by the Clinton administration would now be viewed with the same skepticism, and that it could hinder decision-making as the White House pondered whether to launch military strikes in Kosovo and against the Iraqis. "When it comes time to pull the trigger, the White House will have to think and expect that every serious observer in the country, as well as every wacko, is going ask: OK, is this 'Wag the Dog'?" he said. Hagel said he did not see how Clinton could ever again reassure foreign leaders that his decisions were not being influenced by the scandal. "The fact is that when you've lost that confidence, you've lost it forever," he said. U.S. diplomats abroad say the scandal has begun to color the way the United States and its leaders are being perceived abroad, particularly among nations considered adversaries of the United States. A senior U.S. diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that intelligence reports showed that leaders of unfriendly nations as far-flung as Libya, Cuba and Myanmar were known to have obtained copies of the full report to Congress by the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, from the Internet.
Weekly Standard 9/28/98 Charles Krauthammer During his press conference with Vaclav Havel on September 16, Bill Clinton was trying to demonstrate his engagement in world affairs. He cited the following evidence: I had a good talk with President Chirac of France, who called me a couple of days ago to talk about some of our common concerns and the U.N. inspection system in Iraq and other things. So I feel good about that. Feel good? Just days before, Saddam Hussein had announced the termination of that very U.N. inspection system. Having called the American bluff, he shattered the system of constraints placed on him after the Gulf War to keep him from developing the most terrible weapons on earth….But now Clinton feels good about his chat about this colossal foreign-policy failure. It feels good to talk with a head of state. But Jacques Chirac is not just any head of state. He is a head of state who has been singularly destructive of American policy toward Iraq. He has been staunchly supportive of Saddam in the Security Council. He has refused to back any American action to force Iraqi compliance, has sought to embarrass the United States when it threatened to do so, and has pushed openly for an end to restraints on Saddam.He feels good because for him national interest pales beside personal interest. Indeed, for him national interest does not extend beyond personal interest…..The mission of Bill Clinton's life has always been to escape irrelevance; to transcend the provincial anonymity of his Arkansas boyhood; to seek in recognition, "political viability, honor and applause, validation of his worth, his very existence. To prove himself relevant has been the mission of his life. It is now the mission of his dying presidency. Clinton's need for such validation is endless and constant. It explains his unnatural love for the rope line, his thirst for approval and applause, his indiscriminate desire for the adulation of audience and acolyte. It makes his life a maw for the instant and shallow gratification delivered by people he barely knows. It explains his lifelong dream of the White House: Being the most bountiful trough on the planet, it is the Holy Grail for the creature that is forever feeding. As Clinton has seen himself exposed, as he's watched his spiral descent into mortified irrelevance, his solipsism has acquired a desperation. And in that desperation lies national danger. Personal survival is everything, and he'll take the country through anything -- through seven months of surreal dissimulation, for example -- to ensure it. America is caught in his psychodrama. One day, he observes that perhaps his troubles will help heal the nation. Another, he runs about giving speeches, raising money, and going through the motions of governing. White House officials, explained ABC's Chris Bury, "insist the president finds it therapeutic to focus on his job. On yet another, he feels good about a phone call from France about a policy failure that endangers the United States. Lines between self and other, between Clinton and country, had always been blurred. Now they have disappeared entirely.

New York Post 10/1/98 Editorial It turns out that the White House has been lying about a lot more than just Monica Lewinsky. The issue now is nuclear weapons for Iraq - and the potential consequences are far more significant than Bill Clinton's future. Earlier this month, Scott Ritter, the courageous U.N. arms inspector who resigned in disgust over the Security Council's acquiescence to Saddam Hussein, told Congress he had informed the administration that Iraq has built several implosion devices. All that Saddam needs to build 20-kiloton nuclear weapons - one-and-a-half times the power of the Hiroshima bomb - is a sufficient quantity of plutonium or enriched uranium. After Ritter's testimony, administration officials denied ever receiving such a report - and blasted the ex-Marine's claims as not credible. (Maybe it depends on exactly how you define nuclear weapons.) But now, The Washington Post reports, Ritter actually turned over two such explicit warnings - first in an oral report to the CIA in 1996, and then in a briefing paper for a May 1997 conference held in Washington with the U.S. and Britain. As one U.S. official told The Washington Post, it is credible that they have all the parts to put together

Washington Times 10/3/98 Bill Gertz Twenty six House Republicans have written to President Clinton asking whether the White House is planning an ;October surprise" military strike on Iraq timed to boost Democrats' chances in the November elections. The lawmakers stated in a letter dated Thursday that "we are writing to express our grave concerns about a disturbing report in the August 31, 1998 Arabic News Daily indicating the United States may be preparing for an October strike against Iraq." The Egyptian newspaper, quoting diplomatic sources, stated the United States privately informed the goverments of France, Russia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt that those nations were expected to back the U.S. strike aimed at punishing Baghdad for blocking weapons inspections and defying the aggreement with the United Nations reached in February. …." American Spectator 10/98 Michael Ledeen "Bill Clinton's glorious war against international terror is cut from the same doily as his glorious victories against Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, his mastery of the Middle East, his celebrated anti-proliferation campaign in India and Pakistan, his peace-making in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Kosovo, his masterful de-nuclearization of North Korea and his brave struggle for democracy in China. It is much delicate lace and little iron substance, stitched together by the fanciful conceits that war can be waged at long distance, and that the world can be manipulated as easily as American public opinion. The whole thing is make-believe, a Harry Thomason production with special effects from the Pentagon

The Sunday Times UK 10/4/98 Zoe Brennan SADDAM HUSSEIN is trying to import liposuction equipment into Iraq under the cover of humanitarian aid. Saddam, whose people have been crippled by sanctions since the Gulf war, has asked a United Nations committee to approve the item - which sucks away excess fat - for inclusion on a list of "essential" medical supplies. British officials believe the equipment, which has been requested alongside silicon breast implants, acne cream and dental lasers to whiten teeth, is intended for use by Saddam, his family, friends and supporters. The imports - some of which have already reached the devastated country - would allow Saddam's entourage to continue to pamper themselves despite sanctions designed to curb his brutal regime, according to Foreign Office sources
The Sunday Times UK 10/4/98 Jon Swain UNITED NATIONS policy towards Iraq has been thrown into disarray by the disclosure that Richard Butler, the chief executive of the UN commission in charge of scrapping the country's weapons of mass destruction, wants to resign. Butler has been discouraged from leaving by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general. According to western diplomats, Annan has persuaded Butler to remain in his post until next year. However Butler's eventual departure could further destabilise the operations of the UN special commission (Unscom) following the resignation of Scott Ritter, a senior American arms inspector, in August. Ritter accused both America and Britain of allowing Iraq to evade its Gulf war disarmament obligations. Further resignations are expected. Unscom is not the only UN unit affected by unease over international policy towards Iraq. Denis Halliday, the humanitarian co-ordinator of the Iraqi oil-for-food programme, resigned in disillusionment last week at the end of a long and distinguished UN career

Detroit News 10/7/98 Dina ElBoghdady U.S. Rep. John Conyers, one of the men Democrats are relying on to save President Clinton from impeachment, made exactly the kind of unorthodox remarks Tuesday that make his party leaders nervous. As Clinton seeks forgiveness for his misdeeds, Conyers said, he should also forgive the Iraqi people by lifting U.S.-led economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime. If Clinton does not respond to his request, Conyers vowed to go to the top -- by asking Hillary Rodham Clinton to weigh in. Might as well, the Detroit Democrat said, "we go to her for everything else." Conyers' remarks popped up one day after he led the failed Democratic effort to limit the scope of Clinton impeachment hearings endorsed by the House Judiciary Committee. The comments illustrate why key Democrats privately have fretted about his unpredictable style
AP 10/9/98 Nicole Winfield The American who resigned as a U.N. weapons inspector has threatened to sue his former boss for saying he illegally discussed Iraq's weapons capabilities. Scott Ritter has asked chief U.N. weapons inspector, Richard Butler, to retract the statement if he wants to avoid personal liability for defamatory comments. "If you wish to avoid assuming personal liability, we require your prompt retraction of your accusation,'' the lawyer wrote to Butler in a letter dated Oct. 7.According to a transcript of the show, Butler said he told Ritter, "'You have broken the law in speaking in public about things that you obtained while on official duty, and I demand that you desist from doing that.'';You must know that the Constitution of the United States affords Mr. Ritter the precious guarantee of free speech,'' Lifflander wrote. "Nothing in the United Nations Charter, its rules or its unenforceable agreements supersedes Mr. Ritter's rights as an American citizen.''

Saturday, Oct. 31
N.Y.Times 11/6/98 A.M. Rosenthal ;The United Nations arms inspection system in Iraq is near death. Even if Saddam Hussein lifts his new bans on inspection imposed three months ago, Iraq and its friends at the U.N. have so eviscerated the system that there is no realistic hope it can be revived, with or without bombing, except as a thin facade. These realities are held secret at the U.N. because so many bureaucrats and member nations share responsibility for what is happening. Some countries, like Russia and France, eviscerate quite openly; others, like the U.S., use the hidden knife of apathy. During election campaigns, we don't bother to talk about it. But in the past days a few intimately informed U.N. people have been willing to reveal these truths about the fate of the hunt for Saddam's stockpiles of chemical, nuclear and biological weapons and his plans to build ever more. They are not ready yet to go public, as have Scott Ritter and David Kay of the U.S. and David Kelly of Britain. By daily harassment and trickery, Saddam tried to prevent arms inspection for the first six years after it was put in place by the victors in the gulf war, to contain his power and dreams. But inspection worked anyway. Without it, his weapons would be in use by selected terrorists around the world. The inspectorate found 21 nuclear facilities that Iraq denied existed. Warheads loaded with anthrax and botulinum, evidence of VX, 400,000 liters of chemical agents, missiles, two million liters of precursors used in making chemical weapons, lists of foreign suppliers of death, a whole inventory from hell. Two years ago inspectors drew close to more weapons, and weapons programs, more foreign supply lines. So Saddam started his endgame
Wall Street Journal 11/4/98 Given Bill Clinton's gifts as an illusionist, we were initially suspicious when an international crisis blew up just before the election. But there is a real world out there not created by White House spin doctors and a man named Saddam Hussein is a part of it. A second look convinced us that this crisis is a real one. Saddam has drawn a line in the sand and dared the President to step over it. Mr. Clinton had better act this time around or it won't be long before we are faced with a Saddam who can back his threats with missiles bearing nukes and nerve gas. Indeed, Saddam precipitated this crisis himself, timing it just before elections that could decide Bill Clinton's fate in the forthcoming impeachment hearings. He did it with his Saturday announcement that Iraq was suspending all cooperation with United Nations weapons inspectors until the U.N. sanctions it has endured for most of this decade are lifted. Defense Secretary William Cohen responded that unilateral American retaliation is an option, and asserted that the "credibility of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who brokered a deal last February after an earlier Saddam-manufactured crisis, was on the line. True enough. But it is ultimately Mr. Clinton's credibility that is at stake here. For even the most delusional of multilateralists would be forced to concede that the American President, at least for now, is the man in charge when it comes to reining in Saddam and other despots around the world. Mr. Annan did not go to Baghdad without Mr. Clinton's blessing
The News International Pakistan 11/9/98 The Taleban set November 20 as deadline for the US to prove Osama bin Laden is a 'terrorist' and said he would be cleared if the US failed to do so. "If there is no proof submitted against Osama, then he is innocent. We cannot wait forever for this drama," the Taleban's chief justice, Noor Mohammad Saqid, told reporters in Kabul, on Monday. "We will listen to both sides' statements. The one who makes the claims must present his witnesses and prove the case against the accused, otherwise he will fail," Noor said.Meanwhile, the US intelligence agency has accused Osama of preparing a plan to place bombs through his colleagues in different US installations next month. CIA Deputy Director Air Force, General Johan Gordon, has said CIA had presented an emergency plan to US President Bill Clinton to foil terrorist activities. He said that they had received information of three hundred possible attacks from Osama's organisation since August

Wall St Journal 11/10/98 Jeffrey Taylor David Cloud Despite concerns among some Republicans about the public's disapproval of impeachment proceedings, the House Judiciary Committee vowed to press ahead aggressively with its inquiry. I don't interpret the election as a veto of our efforts," said Committee Chair Henry Hyde (R., Ill.). He added that the Republicans are considering calling president adviser Bruce Lindsey as a witness. The panel's Democrats, meanwhile, attacked the process with new vigor, emboldened by turmoil in the Republican leadership and public opinion polls showing no appetite for ousting the president. But Mr. Hyde and other committee Republicans made it clear that they don't intend to let political pressures or academic opinions derail their inquiry. Rep. Charles Canady, a Florida Republican, opened Monday's hearing with a harsh attack on the president. "He must be called to account for putting his selfish personal interest ahead of his oath of office and his constitutional duty, Mr. Canady said, asserting that the evidence suggests the president did lie under oath and obstruct justice Republican committee members who favor impeachment and the professional investigators employed by the committee to make the case are counting on Mr. Starr to sustain the effort by submitting to Congress additional allegations of White House misconduct. Lawyers working for Mr. Starr say they continue to investigate allegations made by witnesses before the grand jury and may take further action
New York Post 11/11/98 Someone high up in the Clinton administration owes Scott Ritter a public apology. Last August, Ritter resigned in disgust as chief U.N. arms inspector in Iraq. The courageous ex-Marine charged that Washington had backed off its policy on Saddam Hussein, quietly abandoning support for the international team that was aggressively searching for the Iraqi despot's weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton administration hotly denied Ritter's assertions. At first, it suggested he'd overstepped his mandate. Then it leaked baseless accusations that he was illegally slipping classified information to Israel. It now turns out - no big surprise - that Ritter was absolutely on target. According to numerous reports this week, the Clintonites secretly decided last spring to undercut the weapons inspections in favor of a policy of containment - abandoning the search for such arms in hopes of merely preventing their use. Ritter & Co. had uncovered secret Iraqi caches of deadly, forbidden weapons - including anthrax (2,000-plus gallons), botulinium toxin (5,125 gallons), ricin, sarin and VX; some of these chemicals need just a few drops to kill thousands. They also found evidence that Iraq lacks only enriched uranium to detonate nuclear weapons. Some of these deadly weapons have been destroyed; others remain hidden. Even as Ritter and his U.N. team launched surprise inspections of Iraqi facilities, however, the Clinton administration moved swiftly to cut the legs out from under them. Publicly, meanwhile, the president has talked tough - only to back down at the last minute in favor of a conciliatory settlement
Washington Times 11/11/98 Frank Murray The House Judiciary Committee legal staff has concluded that the crimes independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr charged to President Clinton are impeachable offenses. The staff's official printed report outlined clear guiding principles that make it more likely the full House will vote on the accusations against the president. The committee staff conclusions directly contradict earlier arguments by the president's lawyers and by some of the 19 constitutional scholars who debated the issue for 10 hours Monday at a contentious congressional hearing. A copy of the report was obtained yesterday by The Washington Times. It concluded that impeachable offenses include false statements ... under oath," a lesser crime than perjury and easier to prove because intent is not an element. The 94-page committee document declared that articles of impeachment can involve personal or professional misconduct that need not be criminal, and said the constitutional standard for judges and presidents alike is meant to be identical. "There isn't much doubt that he did willfully misstate the facts under oath. It's pretty clear, Mr. Hyde said in a pre-election interview, seemingly accepting as fact a charge that his staff now says is an impeachable offense. The report was quietly distributed as a guide to the decisions by the committee's 37 members, just as a similar document guided the hands that wrote the 1974 articles of impeachment against President Nixon. White House spokesman James Kennedy argued that impeaching an elected president is far more disruptive to the continuity of government than impeaching one of hundreds of appointed federal judges. "So they've fallen short of constitutional standards, they've departed from past precedent and they've broken with past Republican precedent on that issue, said Mr. Kennedy, who said he had not seen the document….Mr. Watt charged that the title pages implied it was the bipartisan product of the committee, rather than simply the majority staff. "I don't think the criticism is appropriate," Mr. Hyde responded to Mr. Watt. He said Democratic staff members were given a copy before it was printed and asked for input. "They came forth with nothing," Mr. Hyde said, adding that Democrats put out three analyses in 1973 and 1974 without ever consulting with GOP committee members. Mr. Watt replied, Two wrongs don't make a right" and contradicted the assertion that minority staffers had a chance to respond before the printing date. "I keep hoping that we will rise to the level of statesmanship here, rather than lowering to the standard that somebody who did something that was not justified in the past did," Mr. Watt said
Media Research Center CyberAlert 11/11/98 ;On FNC's Fox Report David Shuster checked up on the questions submitted five days ago by Henry Hyde to Clinton and learned the White House has yet to decide what to do. Shuster explained the quandary facing Democrats on the Judiciary Committee: "For committee Democrats each passing day seems to raise the possibility that they will be placed in a box. If Mr. Clinton denies that he lied under oath Democrats would have a difficult choice -- either contradict the President, saying in effect that he continues to mislead, or support Mr. Clinton's version of the facts. But that would require calling witnesses and stringing out hearings that Democrats said should end quickly.
MiddleXpress 11/12/98 Iraq's ruling Baath party on Thursday called on Arabs to wage a jihad, or holy war, against the United States which is threatening military strikes against Baghdad. "The appropriate response to the challenge is to adopt all means of fighting and unify the Arab nation's capacity in this battle," the party's leadership said in a statement published in Iraqi newspapers. The Baath party said it was necessary to "take the fight to the highest level of action, Jihad," and to be inspired by the "spirit of the Mother of All Battles," Iraq's description of the 1991 Gulf War…" AP 11/12/98 Eileen Alt Powell "…Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein wants a timetable on when U.N. sanctions will be lifted before he will allow U.N. weapons inspections to resume, a visiting Russian lawmaker said Tuesday. Ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky told reporters after two hours of talks with Saddam that the Iraqi president saw ``no problem'' with monitoring. ``But he would like to have information when the blockade (will be) eliminated,'' Zhirinovsky said. ``When? This year, next year, next century?'' said the legislator, a regular visitor to Iraq who has good relations with Saddam….The Security Council has said they will not be lifted until the inspectors certify that Iraq has eliminated its non-conventional weapons
Newsweek 11/12/98 Juliet Eilperin and Guy Gugliotta House Speaker-to-be Bob Livingston (R-La.) is talking tough about President Clinton's behavior, but privately he has suggested he has little interest in pursuing an impeachment inquiry during his speakership. With House Republicans seemingly split over whether to seek the impeachment of the president, Livingston has yet to take an active role in bridging the differences. In his private conversations with other House members, Livingston has made clear that "he is leaving the whole thing to Hyde," one source said There is a very widespread feeling [among House Republicans] and amongst much of the leadership that they want this off the table for the new Congress," said one leading GOP lawmaker. It is my clear perception that there is nothing the new speaker would want more than to start the next Congress with a clean slate.Bob's a pragmatist, said Rep. W.J. ;Bill Tauzin (R-La.), a close associate of Livingston's. I think he's going to want to work through things as quickly as possible. You're not going to see Bob moralizing on the issue or letting the issue divide the House. In a lunch with reporters yesterday, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said that he expects Republicans to bring an impeachment resolution to the floor next month. Gephardt refused to predict the outcome, but he criticized the GOP's handling of the process. "We've done a lot wrong now and it's hard to put the thing back together again," Gephardt said. "The problem now is that we're out of time. . . . I still think it's very important to get it over with by the end of the year."

11/12/98 Letter to John Conyers from Henry Hyde I am in receipt of your letter of November 11th proposing that the Committee take the unprecedented step of ruling on the Referral from the Office of Independent Counsel under some notion of demurrer or summary judgment. It appears that you have already made up your mind and that you believe a rush to judgment is appropriate without any airing of the facts or thoughtful consideration of the evidence. However, that directly contradicts the approach that the Committee has taken in past impeachment inquiries. As you recall, in the impeachment of President Nixon, the staff report prepared for the use of the Committee concluded: Delicate issues of constitutional law are involved. Those issues cannot be defined in detail in advance of full investigation of the facts John, let me remind you of how you interpreted our duty under the Constitution when you led the inquiry of impeachment of Judge Alcee Hastings in 1988: The goal of the subcommittee's inquiry was to provide to the House all of the facts necessary to make an informed and fair decision about whether Judge Hastings should or should not be impeached. In your letter, you seem inclined to view this impeachment inquiry in any context except a factual one. You cite your views of what the polls mean and the views of some scholars. However, in the impeachment of Judge Hastings, you so aptly stated: An impeachment decision must be based upon the facts. It would be inappropriate, in my opinion, for any Member of Congress to make factual determinations based upon polls or letter received or calls coming into one's office or from any other secondary matter
Wall Street Journal 11/12/98 Editorial Led by Chairman Henry Hyde, Judiciary Committee Republicans are showing a remarkable seriousness in their impeachment inquiry…. This creates a huge opportunity for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who is no doubt preparing the testimony he will present starting next Thursday. The restraints the law puts on any prosecutor have kept him from replying to the White House spin offensive against his person. But, as nearly everyone now agrees, an impeachment inquiry is a political forum; the committee is not deciding whether to send Mr. Clinton to jail, but whether he is fit to hold the nation's highest office. By law and honor, Mr. Starr is bound to help them make this momentous decision, to give them the facts and insights they need…What the committee most needs, it follows, is what evidence the counsel has gathered on whether the lies and perjury in the Lewinsky episode were an isolated incident or part of a pattern. In fact it is clearly the latter, as those of us who are steeped in the events immediately recognize
http://www.house.gov/jec/press/1998/11-12-8.htm 11/12/98 Joint Economic Committee (House Majority) The International Monetary Fund's movement to normalize its relations with Iraq was greeted today with dismay and concern by Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Chairman Jim Saxton (R-N.J.). The IMF is planning to send a mission to Iraq to lay the foundations for normalizing relations, and to consider Iraqi requests for technical assistance. In an interview with an Arab newspaper based in London, a high-level IMF official first disclosed the IMF plans. According to IMF official Paul Chabrier, "Despite the existence of tension and friction between Iraq and the United Nations, I think we are moving towards a form of normalization with it (Iraq). The use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to assist Iraq, Libya, or other such nations through the IMF is unacceptable. The Treasury Department should be attempting to stop such missions and expel members who sponsor terrorism. This episode also underlines the rather low membership standards of the IMF ( standards which need to be significantly tightened for a number of reasons…."

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Wag the Dog Wiggles

Through the Timeline

November 13 - December 13 1998

November 13, 1998

11/13/98 Rep. Bob Barr U.S. Representative Bob Barr (GA-7) released the following statement regarding the ongoing buildup of United States military personnel and weaponry in apparent preparation for action against Iraq: ;The decision by Congress to authorize military action against Iraq in 1991 was made only after full and careful consideration. Such care and consideration should be taken every time the lives of American soldiers are put at risk. ;Sadly, the President has chosen to move our nation to the brink of military action without explaining his actions to the American people or the Congress. We must also make sure our military capabilities are supported by sound intelligence, so we don't end up taking questionable military steps like we did in Sudan and Afghanistan in August. Furthermore, we must ensure our actions are supportive of our key allies in the region, including most importantly, Israel. ;Any U.S. military action must be directed to the accomplishment of a specific goal. The President has not articulated a vision for what he wants to accomplish in the days ahead, or even what our long term goals in Iraq are. While I intend to support our troops no matter where the President sends them, I urge him to carefully consider his actions, and do a better job of explaining what he hopes to accomplish.;

Saturday, Nov. 14, 8 a.m.

Sunday, Nov. 15, 3:00 a.m.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram 11/15/98 Mark Davis It's a frenetic scramble. Members of Congress are struggling to come up with something -- anything -- to get President Clinton's head out of the impeachment guillotine. Funny thing is, they're Republicans. GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee still seem willing to undertake their constitutional duty, but outside the committee room, many of the president's critics are jumping off the impeachment train. The coal isn't getting stoked as it was a couple of months ago. Remember the day of the impeachment vote in the full House? Many Republicans, and even a Democrat or two, rose to passionately argue for the need to press on with the impeachment process despite public distaste. But with the elections over, it's as though Monica Lewinsky were never born. It's as though the highest office in the land were never defiled by its current occupant. It's as though Clinton were a decent man who deserved to get back to work. None of those is true, of course, but reality is now seen through the cracked prism of polls and politics. Add to this the enormous gift of a scuffle with Iraq, and the Clinton White House seems home free for now ;Few believe that the votes exist for a Senate conviction. But shame on us if political bean-counting douses our will to do what the Constitution requires. If Clinton survives a Senate ordeal, at least he will have been placed before the nation with the obligation to directly answer for what he has done. That is what the process requires -- a timid Congress and a disinterested public notwithstanding ;.;

AP 11/17/98 Laura Myers Frequent military buildups in the Persian Gulf since the 1991 war have cost the nation about $7 billion, in addition to the tens of billions of dollars some budget analysts estimate is spent annually on maintaining a strong U.S. military in the region. The Pentagon does not release figures on the spending for day-to-day Gulf duties, though officials said that if that force weren't deployed in the Gulf region, it would be operating elsewhere. But by private budget analysts' estimates, roughly $50 billion of the annual $270 billion in U.S. defense spending goes toward maintaining the Gulf deployment and keeping the Iraqi president in line ;. The extra cost of military buildups in the Gulf since the war has ranged from $100 million in 1992 to $1.4 billion for the two U.S. confrontations with Iraq during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The total is about $7 billion, the Pentagon said. In comparison, the Gulf War -- with a U.S. military buildup that began in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait -- cost $61 billion, but U.S. coalition allies picked up all but $7.4 billion, the Pentagon said....The no-fly patrol budget for fiscal year 1999 is

$850 million.

Reuters 11/18/98 Chinese President Jiang Zemin is expected to flex Beijing's diplomatic muscles during a visit to Moscow next week, opposing U.S.-backed pressure on Iraq and strengthening the budding partnership between China and Russia, analysts said. Jiang is scheduled to travel to Russia from November 22 to 25 for a summit meeting with ailing President Boris Yeltsin. Jiang is also expected to meet Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov as well as leaders of the State Duma, or parliament. It seems that the main goal of the summit will be to simply oppose the U.S., especially on the issue of Iraq,'' said one source close to the Russian embassy ;.;

Reuter's 11/18/98 David Morgan Chief U.N. arms inspector Richard Butler accused Iraq's deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz Wednesday of being responsible for concealing data and perhaps Scud missiles from his weapons teams. ``Iraq has slowed down, as far as it could, the disarmament process,'' he told more than 300 people at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. ``And the key way they have done that is by the concealment mechanism, the chairman of which was his excellency, the deputy prime minister of Iraq, Tareq Aziz,'' he said. Butler, whose inspectors began work Tuesday after being evacuated last week in anticipation of U.S. bombing raids, has written to Aziz about missing documents on Iraq's chemical, biological and ballistic missiles

Wall Street Journal 11/18/98 Editorial To be blunt, the President of the United States is a proven liar; he lied under oath to a grand jury. And even the defenders of his perjury admit that the actions at the center of his perjury diminished the office of the Presidency. This is the unprecedented context in which the whole world is obligated to assess the President's commitment to the Iraqi opposition and to UNSCOM ;.;

BBC News 11/19/98 An Iraqi defector has alleged that the Iraqi regime is continuing to hide weapons and move them between locations to keep them from UN weapons inspectors ;.Abbas al-Janabi defected in February this year after working for 15 years as an aide to Saddam Hussein's feared son Uday. Mr Janabi said in an exclusive television interview for the BBC World programme Hardtalk that biological and chemical weapons and rocket launchers were constantly being moved between sites ;.And Mr Janabi warned the Iraqi leader had said he would be prepared to use weapons of mass destruction if cornered. ;When you put him in a cage he will be very dangerous. He may use chemical or biological [weapons] or what he has.; BBC Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins said it was impossible to verify the testimony, but it is supported by news of more recent massacres of the Iraqi president's opponents in Iraq ;.; Reuter's 11/18/98 David Morgan Chief U.N. arms inspector Richard Butler accused Iraq's deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz Wednesday of being responsible for concealing data and perhaps Scud missiles from his weapons teams. ``Iraq has slowed down, as far as it could, the disarmament process,'' he told more than 300 people at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. ``And the key way they have done that is by the concealment mechanism, the chairman of which was his excellency, the deputy prime minister of Iraq, Tareq Aziz,'' he said. Butler, whose inspectors began work Tuesday after being evacuated last week in anticipation of U.S. bombing raids, has written to Aziz about missing documents on Iraq's chemical, biological and ballistic missiles

Freeper Michael Rivero reports on FoxNews 11/19/98 Fox News just reported that UN Inspector Butler, whom Iraq has repeatedly accused of being a CIA agent provocateur, has announced his offer to quit in the face of Iraq's refusal to provide documents Iraq claims they do not have in the first place ;.; BBC News 11/19/98 An Iraqi defector has alleged that the Iraqi regime is continuing to hide weapons and move them between locations to keep them from UN weapons inspectors ;.Abbas al-Janabi defected in February this year after working for 15 years as an aide to Saddam Hussein's feared son Uday. Mr Janabi said in an exclusive television interview for the BBC World programme Hardtalk that biological and chemical weapons and rocket launchers were constantly being moved between sites ;.And Mr Janabi warned the Iraqi leader had said he would be prepared to use weapons of mass destruction if cornered. ;When you put him in a cage he will be very dangerous. He may use chemical or biological [weapons] or what he has.; BBC Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins said it was impossible to verify the testimony, but it is supported by news of more recent massacres of the Iraqi president's opponents in Iraq ;.;

Drudge - THE WASHINGTON TIMES 11/19/98 Bill Gertz An Islamic group in Iraq has called for a holy war against the United States, according to a broadcast by Baghdad's government radio. The Popular Organization of Islamic Conference issued a statement in Baghdad calling for a jihad, or holy war, ;by Muslims throughout the world against the U.S. administration,; according to a Baghdad Radio broadcast on Monday. The group's statement said ;striking [the U.S. administration's] interests has become a holy and legitimate duty recognized by divine and human laws so as to protect societies against U.S. injustice.; The Iraqi group stated that the Clinton administration ;supports the Zionists, who have usurped holy Arab and Muslim places,; and said Muslims should ;seriously work to confront U.S. tyranny and condemn its hostile acts against faithful Iraq.;

Weekly Commentary by R. Emmett Tyrrell Nov. 20 1998 R. Emmett Tyrrell Washington, DC Why is it that it is our duty as citizens to treat an impeachment of President Bill Clinton with the utmost gravity? In part it is because these momentous proceedings will have serious consequences for the rule of law and the integrity of our Constitution. But there is a more immediate consideration. Recent military decisions by the President reveal that if we proceed with his impeachment he might blow up much of the Islamic world. From Morocco on the Atlantic to Pakistan on the Arabian Sea, there may not remain a pharmaceutical plant standing. The pyramids could be bombed!

The Hindustan Times 11/21/98 AP The man the United States has declared enemy No. 1 is a man without sin,; Afghanistan´s hard line Islamic Taliban militia declared yesterday, saying the case against Osama Bin Laden was closed. A three-week inquiry headed by Afghanistan´s Chief Justice Noor Mohammed Saqib into allegations that Bin Laden is waging a war of terror against the United States ended today. It´s over and America has not presented any evidence,; Saqib told the Associated Press in an interview at the Supreme Court building in the Afghan capital. Without any evidence, Bin Laden is a man without sin .... ;He is a free man,; he said ;It is their shame that they have been silent,; said Saqib. ;America is wrong about Bin Laden...For anything that happens now anywhere in the world they blame Osama, but the reality is in the proof and they have not given us any,; he added.

Washington Post 11/22/98 Meg Greenfield The Clinton administration and the British government have both indicated that if Saddam Hussein resists or interferes with the UNSCOM inspection procedures again, in the aftermath of the cancellation of the last proposed strike against him, they will both feel free to stage an attack immediately and without warning. He'll know it's going to happen when it happens, and he won't have to wait around for it all that long. That is the threat, which one must assume could be carried out any day, or that it will already have been carried out by the time you read this edition of The Post. But it is also possible that for the time being Saddam Hussein will have stayed within the confines of the understanding that bought him a last-minute reprieve, and that he will stay there, as he usually does, until he figures the coast is clear. In the past he has been very good at making that calculation Associated Press 11/23/98 Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's deputy narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in a southern Iraqi city, Baghdad television reported Monday. Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam's deputy on the powerful Revolutionary Command Council, was attending a religious ceremony Sunday when assailants threw two grenades at him as he got out of his car, according to the report ;.;

Federation of American Scientists 1998 editors Iraq has rebuilt key chemical weapons facilities since 1991. While they are subject to United Nations scrutiny, some could be converted from industrial and commercial use fairly quickly, allowing Iraq to restart limited production of chemical weapons agents. Iraq currently has 41 sites with equipment that could be converted to produce chemical weapons agents and their precursors and four facilities that produced chemical munitions until 1991 and could do so again. At least 30 facilities have infrastructure that could be reconfigured for weapons production. Iraq also has the experience and know-how in large-scale production of chemical weapons agents and sufficient qualified personnel with practical experience in research and development on, and the industrial production of, CW agents. It is also thought that Iraq retains a broad array of chemical-weapons-related items such as precursor chemicals, production equipment, filled munitions, and program documentation, as well as requisite technical expertise. UNSCOM estimated that, under current circumstances, Iraq would be able to organize the production of chemical agents through reconfiguration or relocation of available dual-use material within several days or weeks ;.;

USA Journal 11/26/98 Jon Dougherty However, a story broke yesterday – covered in the Journal today – that should take the remaining wind out of the sails of the dwindling legion of defenders of President Clinton. If it doesn’t, then those people who still refuse to face up to the truth about this man should be made to pack their bags and leave this great nation of ours because they simply don’t belong here any longer. Matt Drudge reported Wednesday evening that some 20,000 top secret State Department and intelligence documents have been leaked to key media personnel. Those documents may not only substantiate claims that Clinton has sold this country out to foreign hostile interests, but reportedly also detail how he did it. According to Drudge, the papers tell the stories about why North Korea has renewed their nuclear programs, why Iraq remains defiant, and why India and Pakistan tested and have begun to field new nuclear weapons systems within the past year. In short, they tell a story of incompetence, deception and greed – all Clinton trademarks. Furthermore the documents may also place Vice President Al Gore in an even worse light with the intelligence community after a New York Times a few days ago said he has been discounting CIA reports that were critical of Russia because the administration ;doesn’t want to hear any bad news about their friends in Moscow,; even if true ;.. But the revelation about these documents also answers some other questions. For example, they may explain why socialist Democrats in the Senate have helped scuttle any hope in the near future of a national ballistic missile defense. The papers may also help explain why Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector, was so savagely attacked by this administration when he blew the whistle on the bogus U.S. effort to find and destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The discovery of these papers may also help explain why Congress has been so reluctant to pursue these cases of more serious abuses of office against Clinton [because many of them are in on all of this too]. And it may just help explain why Attorney General Janet Reno’s ‘see no evil’ attitude with Clinton and Gore prevails to this day. If the U.S. AG would attempt to threaten all the sweetheart deals Clinton and Gore have made with their greedy co-conspirators, it’s hard telling what the Clinton Spin Machine would do to her and her career. But what now? When these reports are substantiated – and they will be – what will Congress and Reno do then? ;.But now it’s a different ball game. You see, no matter how well you cover your tracks in politics, when it comes to running an entire country there is literally nothing you can get accomplished by yourself. Our fine folks in the intelligence community will go along with an inept president and vice president for a while – but only as long as it doesn’t seriously damage their ability to protect this nation from itself. Their positions of authority and power supercede the White House because these people are career folks who have been there forever and will be there long after socialist idiots like Clinton are gone ;.; The Independent - UK Mary Dejevsky 11/27/98 THOUSANDS OF sensitive documents relating to US national security have been leaked, according to reports on the Internet yesterday. But America's mainstream media, preoccupied with the Thanksgiving holiday, seemed not to want to know. The documents, as many as 20,000 pages of them, are said to detail efforts by the Clinton administration to conceal the extent of Iraq's weapons development plans, White House approval for exports of sensitive satellite technology to China, and information about the incentives offered by Washington to North Korea in return for curbing its nuclear programme - terms that North Korea has in the event ignored ;..Verbatim details from the papers were not available yesterday, and Murray Waas, the reporter said to have the papers, could not be reached. Drudge suggested that Waas, who writes for the pro-Clinton Internet magazine Salon, was reluctant to divulge the contents while Bill Clinton faces impeachment proceedings ;.;

Jewish World Review 12/3/98 Cal Thomas [Madeleine] Albright assured reporters that ;every dollar (of U.S. aid) is accounted for and is completely transparent.'' Not exactly. A secret 600-page report last year by the PA's own auditing office found $323 million, nearly 40 percent, of the PA's annual budget had been wasted, stolen or misused. A December, 1995, General Accounting Office report said it was ``unable to independently verify (the Palestine Liberation Organization's) financial condition since the PLO was unwilling to provide us with requested accounting reports and supporting documentation.''....Former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter told the Jerusalem Post Nov. 3: ;The (Wye accord) is to be monitored by the CIA, but the real arbiter will be the State Department, and this is a cause for great worry. The entire effort has been politicized -- this is the Clinton administration's own Camp David, and they really can't afford to let it fail. Therefore they cannot be counted upon to be honest brokers.'' So, the Jews are again being sold out ;.;

12/9/98 Julia Malone 'Spiked' News Article Item. Would it be right for a president to put his hand on the Bible twice and solemnly swear to faithfully execute the office of president ;so help me God; and then go into a court proceeding and lie? Or, should there be an exception in the case of Bill Clinton because the subject is sex? Doesn't this lie in the highest office have a trickle down effect in courts, schools and homes? Are kids now speaking of ;pulling a Clinton; to mean telling half truths? Is that right for the country? Item. Should members of Congress pore over the election results and exit polls to decide what to do? Should they take the advice of hundreds of historians who say that impeachment in this case would damage the presidency? Should they listen to constitutional lawyers, who often directly contradict each other? Or, should they study the Constitution, the fundamental principles that undergird the nation, and examine their own convictions? Item. Is it right for the president to talk about elevating the role of women and then engage in the most demeaning kind of sex with a female employee inside the office that symbolizes his public trust? Didn't he promise the nation to give up such behavior before his election? Or is it ;just; sex? Just such casual sex has spread AIDS and a host of other infections at an alarming rate. And doesn't a lack of morals in the highest office inevitably contribute to the breakdown in homelife in the country? Item. Since the president lied to his family, who are closest to him, who can be sure he is truthful to others? He has admitted to deceiving his Cabinet, the public and his staff. When can his veracity be trusted in his private negotiations with Israel or his secret handling of Iraq? Or should we, as some urge, forget the whole unpleasant business? ;.;

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more likely to impeach him, Clinton might expect to come under unprecedented pressure to resign and spare the nation a protracted trial in the Senate. A Washington Post-ABC poll published Tuesday found that 58 percent of respondents thought Clinton ought to resign rather than fight removal in a Senate trial. But several political analysts and pollsters contacted by Reuters predicted that public support for Clinton might harden if he is impeachment, and said he would have many reasons to fight on. ``We're all looking for some softening in support for Clinton but it's not there yet,'' said Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, who criticized the wording of the Washington Post-ABC poll question as confusing. ``You can't take the public for granted. Things might change. But the public has stuck with him through everything throughout this scandal,'' Kohut said....

Reuters 12/15/98 U.S. military forces in the Gulf have been put on high alert based on significant, credible evidence'' of possible imminent terrorist action against Americans in the area, the Pentagon said Tuesday.The statement by Defense Department spokesman Ken Bacon in response to questions from reporters came a day after the State Department said U.S. diplomats and citizens in seven Gulf states could be in danger from attack, possibly in the next 30 days. Most of our forces in the Gulf are now in a threat condition called 'Charlie', which is the third out of four threat conditions,'' Bacon said. The definition of 'ThreatCon Charlie' is that an incident has occurred or intelligence has been received indicating that some form of terrorist action is imminent.''...

Drudge Report 12/15/98 Matt Drudge 22:29:48 UTC SOURCES: CLINTON TOLD ON AIR FORCE ONE THAT HE CURRENTLY DOES NOT HAVE THE VOTES TO DEFEAT IMPEACHMENT IN THE HOUSE. 223 MEMBERS ARE NOW PREDICTED TO VOTE FOR ONE OR ALL OF COMMITTEE ARTICLES. NUMBERS COULD STILL SHIFT, WARN CONGRESSIONAL COUNTERS. BUT IT BECAME CLEAR LATE TUESDAY THAT A MAJORITY HAS LIKELY BEEN REACHED.

FOX 12/15/98 Chief U.N. arms inspector Richard Butler apparently has concluded that Iraq has not restored full cooperation with his weapons experts, diplomats said Tuesday.Butler, ..., hand-delivered his crucial report to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan late Tuesday. Diplomats described the document as drawing negative'' conclusions about Iraq's cooperation with arms inspections, which Baghdad first limited on Aug. 5 and halted on Oct. 31. The inspectors returned to Iraq on Nov. 14. Butler's report could provide a basis for possible U.S.-British air strikes against Iraq, which both countries have said could be conducted without any further diplomatic consultations or warnings. In contrast, the diplomats said a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), responsible for nuclear disarmament, gave a positive evaluation of Baghdad's compliance in allowing inspections. Butler's report, expected to be released late Tuesday or Wednesday, is to determine whether the Security Council will conduct a comprehensive review of its relations with Iraq that Baghdad hopes will eventually lead to a lifting of U.N. sanctions in force since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Baghdad has allowed a number of inspections without incident, but it halted three of them and has turned over only one of the 12 weapons-related documents Butler requested. The most serious standoff was on Dec. 10 when UNSCOM contended it was blocked from entering the ruling Baath party offices unless it limited inspectors to four and said in advance what the group was seeking. UNSCOM has also complained it was barred on Nov. 26 from a military base of the People's Mujahedeen, an Iranian opposition group. And Friday, a Baghdad-based chemical monitoring team was prevented from inspecting a warehouse on grounds that it was the Muslim Sabbath. In Washington, State Department spokesman James Foley, in apparent anticipation of Butler's report, said all of these incidents are simply unacceptable.'' Iraq submitted its own detailed analysis of the inspectors' actions Monday, saying that the teams were able to interview all individuals required and to reach all the sites they wished to inspect.'' But the report, obtained by Reuters, accused several teams, including one led by Australian Roger Hill, in charge of concealment activities, of carrying out its work in an ''intrusive and provocative manner,'' even inspecting a private residence in an effort to provoke Iraq. Baghdad halted cooperation with UNSCOM on grounds that it served Washington's interests by refusing to declare that Iraq's forbidden chemical, biological and ballistic potential had been eliminated. Clearances from UNSCOM and from the Vienna-based IAEA are a key requirement for ending the stringent economic sanctions.

December 16, 1998

AP 12/16/98 Waiel Faleh Anti-aircraft guns opened fire in Baghdad early Thursday, and U.S. and British officials announced they had launched a series of airstrikes. No attacking planes or missiles were immediately seen over the Iraqi capital. The Iraqi blasts created loud explosions, violently shaking the glass windows of the Information Ministry building near the center of Baghdad where foreign reporters are based. Orange glows streaked toward the sky as the anti-aircraft guns let loose volley after volley of shots. The explosions begin about 12:49 a.m. Thursday (4:49 p.m. EST Wednesday). A barrage of blasts lighted the sky several hours after the Clinton administration warned that it would make a military strike against Iraq at any time. President Clinton ordered airstrikes on Iraq over a protracted impasse with Iraq over U.N. weapons inspections just minutes before the blasts began. Less than an hour later, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the British had participated in the airstrikes. Earlier in the day, long lines formed outside Baghdad gas stations and customers cursed Clinton for planning an attack before the holy Islamic month of Ramadan, which is expected to begin Sunday....Few people were out at the time of the explosions and and few cars were on the streets of the capital. Air raid sirens sounded briefly in Baghdad shortly before midnight local time. Earlier, Iraqi television interrupted regular programming to play patriotic music and footage of Iraqi commandos training with machine guns, hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Any strike would come from the Persian Gulf, where the United States has 24,100 military men and women. There also are 22 warships, including eight with Tomahawk cruise missiles, and 201 aircraft, including 72 on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. Britain has 22 strike aircraft in the region. Earlier Wednesday, three trucks loaded with luggage left the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. About a half-hour later, three busloads of weapons inspectors also left the U.N. compound, followed by four white U.N. cars carrying spare tires on top. ...Iraq says it has complied with every U.N. demand, and accuses Butler of prolonging the inspections at the behest of the United States.On Tuesday, Butler gave a report to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in which he said Iraq's claim to be free of banned weapons cannot be accepted without further verification.'' But verification is impossible as Iraq is obstructing the inspectors, he said.

Reuters 12/16/98 The air strikes against Iraq will probably give President Clinton a brief boost in U.S. public opinion, but while they will delay the process of his impeachment, they will not derail it, analysts said Wednesday. There will be a 36-hour bounce for the president as the nation rallies around our military personnel, but it will only be temporary, and we will then get back to business in the impeachment debate,'' pollster John Zogby said. Clinton ordered the air strikes on Iraq after Baghdad refused to cooperate with U.N. inspectors trying to find and destroy Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The strikes began a day before the House of Representatives was due to debate and vote on articles of impeachment charging Clinton with perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power. Republican leaders decided to delay that debate for a day or two. But some senior Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, immediately questioned Clinton's motives in launching the attack. I cannot support this military action in the Persian Gulf at this time,'' Lott, a Mississippi Republican, said. Both the timing and the policy are subject to question.'' He was supported by some House Republicans and Georgia Sen. Paul Coverdell. But most other Republican senators said they strongly backed the military action.... Political scientist Gary Jacobson of the University of California, San Diego, said Lott's attack demonstrated the level of distrust between Clinton and Republicans, which he said was virtually unprecedented in U.S. history.... If the Republicans do face a backlash, it will be in elections of the year 2000,'' he said. Pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center said Republicans were taking a big risk by questioning the president during a military operation. Lott's statement was very ill-advised and won't help the Republicans. Americans want bipartisanship to prevail during foreign crises,'' he said. He said he did not expect much change in Clinton's already high approval ratings but thought Republican unpopularity, already growing in recent weeks, could deepen. Clinton seemed certain to face criticism, both at home and abroad, for the timing of the Iraq attack. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who served in the Republican administration of George Bush, said that even if the attack was necessary, the timing was questionable. Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul went so far as to say that Clinton's action in attacking Iraq was itself illegal and possibly impeachable. This is an outrage, and we shouldn't be participating in it. We should not permit our president to do this. It's very dangerous. It has nothing to do with national security,'' Paul said. As a matter of fact, I think waging war without congressional approval is an impeachable act.''

AP 12/16/98 Darlene Superville Rep. Bob Livingston knew he wouldn't have a trouble-free move into the House speaker's chair, but the explosion of events Wednesday quickly brought home the magnitude of the role he is about to assume. As the House began to complete plans for a debate Thursday on articles of impeachment against President Clinton, the White House ordered military airstrikes on Iraq for Saddam Hussein's repeated defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors. The decision pre-empted the impeachment debate for the time being as House Republicans reluctantly agreed to a brief delay. It also left Clinton's GOP critics frustrated by the fact that he may have outsmarted them yet again. Livingston, R-La., said that while Clinton may have won for the moment, the impeachment process will move forward in the House and soon. The coincidence of that legislation and the action of our government is unique. That's all I'll say about that,'' a displeased Livingston said after emerging from a closed meeting with the GOP rank-and-file. But in the interest of support of our troops, we think that tomorrow the only thing that we need do is go forward and pass a resolution of support for our troops.'' Instead of a debate heavy with the constitutional and other implications of impeachment, the House on Thursday will vote on a resolution supporting U.S. troops participating in Operation Desert Fox.'' Republicans support the effort to contain Saddam, Livingston said. But he made it clear that the impeachment process would not be derailed. We reserve our right to take our constitutional action under the impeachment clause of the Constitution, and we reserve our right within the next few days to complete the business that brought us here in these last few hours,'' he said. Livingston tried, albeit unrealistically, to assume the speaker's post without controversy. The action against Iraq was unforeseen, but impeachment was shaping up to be all his, particularly since the current speaker, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., practically withdrew from the scene after announcing he would leave Congress. Livingston appeared to have succeeded in his plans to lie low during the impeachment debate until last weekend, however, when he said the House would not vote on any resolution to censure the president. He said such action would violate the careful balance of separation of powers.''

12/17/98 Freeper GoodSense, MSNBC, On thursday nights broadcast, Tibble, the on-the-spot fireworks commentator for MSNBC remarked that he had just arrived across the border just seven days ago.

AP 12/17/98 VIENNA, Austria -- Not all U.N. weapons inspectors are down on Iraq. The agency investigating Iraq's nuclear program says it has run into far fewer problems than Richard Butler's inspection teams. Butler's U.N. Special Commission, known as UNSCOM, rejects Baghdad's claims it has destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction, and he accuses Iraq of obstructing teams trying to verify their elimination. UNSCOM inspects and monitors chemical and biological weapons programs as well as those involving long-range missiles. The International Atomic Energy Agency, on the other hand, has said it believes Iraq no longer has much to hide in the area of nuclear weapons. The IAEA, based in Vienna, has given Iraq fairly good marks, saying it has provided ``the necessary level of cooperation'' to enable the nuclear inspectors to complete their work ``efficiently and effectively.'' But IAEA officials say their job has been easier than that of UNSCOM, and therefore less confrontational....

NY Times 12/18/98 JOHN M. BRODER with BARBARA CROSSETTE ...The president and senior administration officials said that Clinton had not made the final decision to unleash a barrage of missiles and bombs on targets across Iraq until Tuesday, hours after receiving the report by Richard Butler, the weapons inspector. But a full two days earlier, Butler had informed Clinton what he intended to say in his report, and when he would say it. And the president issued a highly classified order to the Pentagon on Sunday morning that began a 72-hour countdown to the air assault....But Butler's report was in many ways a simple formality. Officials in New York and Washington said that there was little in the Butler report that had not been available to American officials days, even weeks, earlier. Military plans and hardware were already in place for raids that could have come at any time after Dec. 1....

Minneapolis Star Tribune 12/18/98 Acting on early word from the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, President Clinton set in motion Wednesday's military strike two days before Richard Butler formally told the Security Council that Saddam Hussein again was in defiance of the United Nations, senior administration officials said Thursday. They said that Clinton had not made the final decision to attack Iraq until Tuesday, hours after receiving Butler's report. But two days earlier, Butler had informed Clinton what he intended to say and when he would say it. And the president issued an order to the Pentagon on Sunday morning that began a 72-hour countdown to the assault. The report was delivered to the Security Council and U.S. officials as Clinton was flying home Tuesday from the Middle East. About two hours into the 10-hour flight from Jerusalem, he gave the order to U.S. forces to be prepared to strike within 24 hours But Butler's report was in many ways a formality. Officials at the United Nations and in Washington said that there was little in it that had not been available to U.S. officials days, even weeks, earlier. Military plans and hardware already were in place for raids that could have begun at any time after Dec. 1. The timing of the strikes - on the eve of the House impeachment vote - sparked protests by Republicans who accused Clinton of orchestrating a crisis to slow the momentum toward impeachment

AP 12/18/98 ... The calls went out to Capitol Hill. From Hillary Rodham Clinton. From Vice President Al Gore. From President Clinton himself. White House officials could not - or would not - say whether the trio's high-powered telephone lobbying campaign won over any House members contemplating a ``yes'' vote on Clinton's impeachment...Much like her efforts at earlier crisis points in the Lewinsky scandal, Mrs. Clinton joined the White House telephone campaign to beat back a surge of impeachment sentiment in Congress.... By day, she consulted with historians and constitutional experts, her spokeswoman said, but was not preparing to make any public appeal on the matter. ``She's talked to members'' of Congress, said spokeswoman Marsha Berry. ``She's talked to folks who are experts on our Constitution and historians, other folks in that area. She's concerned. It's an issue she takes seriously. She's one who likes to have a lot of information.'' Gore also went back to the phones lobbying House members, an aide said, for ``a good chunk of the morning.'' Clinton himself called a handful of House Democrats to discuss their strategy for the debate and vote. Clinton would not concede defeat in the House until the final roll call, press secretary Joe Lockhart said. ``On a vote this important and this solemn, yes, there's always a chance.'' Today, official duties would offer distraction from his peril on Capitol Hill. The president was meeting with European Union leaders to review trade tensions, working on next year's budget with his economic team and meeting with his HIV/AIDS advisory panel....

Saturday, Dec. 19, 1998

AP 12/19/98 William Jefferson Clinton will be forever marked as only the second president ever impeached, struck low by sexual indiscretions and many months of legal deception. The legacy he fretted over so much and worked so hard to build is indelibly stained. The president's struggle for achievements in his last two years in office - if he survives at all - will be waged against long odds and a backdrop of unrelenting partisanship that strike many Americans as spinning out of control. Surely history will be struck by the bewildering hostilities that strew casualties across the political battlefield of 1998, Republican and Democrat alike. ... The House impeached Clinton on Saturday for perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice and sent his case to the Senate for trial. It rejected articles accusing him of perjury in a civil lawsuit and abuse of power. Can Clinton wage a successful battle for survival in a Senate trial as did President Andrew Johnson in 1868? Will the public turn and clamor for his resignation, forcing him to resign as Richard Nixon did 24 years ago even before the House took up articles of impeachment against him? Will political wisemen - a Bob Dole, Bob Strauss or other elders - emerge with a compromise of censure to save the country from more tumoil? With an impeachment vote that seemed unthinkable after Republican election losses in November, the nation plunges into uncertainty - unlike anything Americans have seen in 130 years. The stakes are huge.... Already a bipartisan tradition on national security has been strained by GOP suspicions of Clinton's motivation in Iraq policy.... The capital's bitter mood was underscored by the sour cynicism that greeted Clinton's decision to launch airstrikes against Iraq on the eve of the scheduled impeachment vote. Even with Clinton tarred by impeachment, there is debate about the future of his presidency and what he can accomplish. ``He's had nine lives or 12 lives or 14 lives,'' said Tom Cronin, president of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. ``Clinton watchers are not going to rule him out. He's maybe a lame, lame duck but he's still president. In three months he'll be viewed as a different president because he's been impeached but we'll be back to business as usual.'' But historian Dallek said, ``For the last two years of his presidency, his authority is largely shot. Of course he has the nominal powers of the office. He can veto bills. He is commander in chief. ``Can he achieve anything of a far-reaching nature? It's hard to believe this Republican Congress is going to follow his lead on anything important,'' Dallek said. ``In the long term, his legacy is blighted by this scandal....''

AP 12/19/98 Jocelyn Noveck Throwing stones, burning flags and even breaking into a U.S. ambassador's home, protesters throughout the Arab world joined Saturday in a bitter wave of anger over the airstrikes on Iraq. A common theme of the protests was that all Arabs — not just Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein — are being targeted by the U.S. and British attacks. The aggression on Iraq is an aggression on the whole Arab nation,'' said Aziza Fadhel, a university student in the Syrian capital, Damascus ..In a rare protest in the Syrian capital, thousands marched through downtown Damascus on Saturday, and about 1,000 people — most of them students — attacked the U.S. Embassy, its nearby residence and the American Cultural Center

Reuters 12/19/98 FoxNews U.S. and British forces launched a fourth night of air strikes against Iraq Saturday, the first day of Islam's holy month of Ramadan, as Baghdad vowed to resist the attacks until its last citizen.'' Anti-aircraft fire lit the sky over the Iraqi capital, mostly over its southeastern outskirts, for about 30 minutes, ending around 7.15 p.m. (1615 GMT). It resumed around two hours later and witnesses reported at least one missile hitting the city. I tell you all that Iraq will continue to defend its land, policy and dignity...We will fight until the last citizen,'' Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan told a news conference in Baghdad. He also said the mission of U.N. inspectors charged with destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was over. It was Baghdad's alleged obstruction of the inspector's work that triggered the U.S. and British strikes

AFP 12/19/98 TEHRAN .British and US troops entered Iraqi territory on Friday night across the Saudi border, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported Saturday. Citing informed sources in Khoramshahr, a town bordering Iraq in southwestern Iran, the news agency said the troops had advanced five kilometres (three miles) into Iraqi territory. The sources, which were not further identified, were unable to say whether or not the troops had remained in Iraq. An Iraqi information ministry official said Friday that Saudi armoured units had advanced to the Iraqi border the previous day on an apparent reconnaissance mission before pulling back

Electronic Telegraph 12/20/98 Mark Steyn FOR months now the refrain of Bill Clinton's defenders has been: everyone does it. Birds do it, bees do it, even Republican Speaker nominees do it. And Bob Livingston doesn't do it by halves: as it emerged this week, he's committed not one but a ton of infidelities. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, cried the Democrats. And yesterday Mr Livingston did, casting his stone smack in his own crotch and resigning the Speakership. For two days, Democrats had denounced the Republicans for leading a Right-wing coup d'etat . But when was the last time a coup leader assassinated himself? ...But that is what it has come to in the Lyin' King's Washington: you can't tell the difference between the President of the United States and the publisher of Hustler. Somehow all political life has now taken on the character of Mr Clinton's sexual proclivities. There is going to be a trial, declared Gloria Borger on CBS News. It may not go to completion. Completion is not a legal term but the Starr Report's formulation for what the President, er, rarely reaches. Likewise, for a couple of days we had a war, but that too is not going to completion. That's why Saddam, also taking his cue from Mr Clinton's sexual behaviour, declined to reciprocate. Why waste your own men and resources when the Great Satan's just going through the motions for a few nights? Though both men would be insulted by the comparison, they're not dissimilar: one scoffs at Unscom inspection requests, the other at the Independent Counsel's subpoenas. One pretends to be surprised when chemical weapons suddenly turn up, the other when Whitewater billing records or White House coffee-morning videos suddenly turn up. The only difference is that Bill Clinton's weapon of mass destruction has been turned against him and that Saddam isn't so foolish as to let UN inspectors come across a cocktail dress with a telltale anthrax stain. Yet in one crucial respect Mr Clinton has reached completion: his credibility has been well and truly spent. The White House, suddenly fearful of Senate numbers, is now scrambling for any compromise: my own choice is the Canaan Banana solution, whereby the President grabs a false beard and forged papers and hightails it. Meanwhile, Mr Clinton is running out of distractions. What was interesting this week was how quickly the novelty of bombing Saddam wore off. Forced to choose between air strikes on Baghdad and the ongoing consequences of his glandular urges, caught between Iraq and a hard place, most news organisations quickly decided the real story was the impeachment. You can't blame them. In January, just after Monica broke, the Commander-in-Chief, with his loyal sidekick Tony the Boy Wonder, gave Saddam an ultimatum and ordered a billion-dollar build-up in the Gulf in August, after his historic First Apology flopped, he bombed a Sudanese aspirin factory this week, he ordered air strikes against Baghdad. No doubt, on the first day of the Senate trial, he'll launch all-out nuclear Armageddon. But, for the most part, you can't help noticing how ineffectual these curiously timely initiatives are. The Middle East peace accords he staged before November's elections are all but dead. The Palestinians waving American flags on Monday had by Thursday reverted to their traditional pastime of burning them. Something else changed this week. Bob Livingston's fleet of mistresses may sell a few extra copies of Hustler, but the revelations only emphasised how Bill Clinton is still fighting the last war. Even before yesterday's bombshell resignation, the Republicans' big success in Friday's debate was in finally making the issue not the sex, not the lying about sex, but the crimes. Indeed, throughout this long first year of post-non coital investigation, Mr Clinton has given respectable old-school adulterers such as Mr Livingston a bad name. It may be time for sexist swingers to explain that his behaviour is not consistent with minimum standards of philandering....

Newsletter 12/20/98 Mr. Kim Weissman More than two years ago, Jerome Zeifman, the democrat chief counselto the House Judiciary Committee which acted to impeach President Nixon,came to the conclusion that there is now probable cause to consider ourpresident and first lady as felons , he saw a pattern or deceit and corruption , he saw his party, the Democratic Party, as defenders of acorrupt administration , and he concluded that there was a cancer on the Clinton presidency painfully reminiscent of the cancer that broughtdown Nixon . Two years after Jerome Zeifman made his disillusionmentpublic, the democrat party, in Zeifman's prophetic words spoken twoyears ago, continues the folly of marching in lockstep in support of acorrupt president in the name of party unity. On a completely partisanvote, virtually every democrat marched in lockstep in defense of BillClinton, voting on the Articles of Impeachment

New York Post 12/20/98 Dick Morris There is no functional difference between initiating bombing and continuing bombing during Ramadan. So why did he bomb before the impeachment vote? Clinton knew that it wouldn't sway any votes, and he knew that delaying the impeachment vote by a few days would have no consequence. But two political reasons now come into focus for his decision to bomb when he did. Clinton knew that after the impeachment vote, demands for his resignation would mount. He likely has been thrown into a panic by polls which showed the sentiment for resignation would rise after impeachment. By demonstrating his retention of presidential authority and willingness to use it dramatically, he could defuse the case for resignation. In addition, the prolific use of the don't impeach while the bombs are falling argument by House Democrats in the impeachment debate raises suspicions that he may have initiated the bombing to give the Democrats a talking point during the debate. That way, they would spend less time talking about sex or perjury and more time talking about patriotism. In general, Bill Clinton has tried to project the image of being very busy .How can you even think about asking him to resign? Don't you see how busy he is? Don't you see how fully engaged he is as president despite the specter of impeachment? Are you a fool? A few weeks ago, Clinton likely decided that impeachment was inevitable, but so was Senate acquittal ..

The Orlando Sentinel 12/20/98 Charley Reese In a season in which Christians celebrate the son of God's message of peace and love, Clinton has forced the American military to kill innocent people in Iraq to distract the American public from Clinton's own law-breaking Clinton is an evil man. His administration is corrupt from one end to the other and is riddled with liars. The decision to bomb Iraq was clearly designed to postpone the impeachment vote. It was a put-up job from start to finish. Note these facts: Iraq did not throw the arms inspectors out. Richard Butler, the little weasel and stooge for Clinton, deliberately set up a confrontation by trying to crash his way into the Ba'ath political party headquarters, knowing that he would be refused. What, after all, did he expect to find? A missile in a file cabinet? Then Butler ordered his minions out of the country on his own, without consulting the United Nations Security Council or the secretary-general, and filed a one-sided report. Clinton then ordered the attack before the Security Council could even finish discussing the report. In a demonic way, Clinton is sewing the seeds of war, hatred and death. The bombing of Iraq is an act of American terrorism, pure and simple. Unfortunately, innocent Americans will reap the bloody harvest. Clinton has no policy .. More and more America seems surreal. People no longer know right from wrong. Television treats war like just another show ( We'll be right back to tell you more about the killing after these messages. ) Ignorance and malice have replaced education and civility. A recent survey showed a huge majority of American high-school students are liars, cheats and thieves. Absent a religious revival, I wouldn't give you 2 cents for the future of this country. Merry Christmas

E-Mail 12/20/98 Charles Smith The Pentagon -U.S. war-planners are not all that happy with operation DESERT FOX. The strike was telegraphed to Iraq far in advance and mostof the Iraqi mobile Surface to Air missile (SAM) units escapeddamage. The prime target for U.S. strikes, the IraqiIntegrated Air Defense network (NATO code-name Tiger Song ), suffered no major damage and appears to have lost no missile units. The only real hard target kills that can be claimed are a few attack helicopters destroyed at a northern Iraqi air-base. Ironically, the Iraqi Tiger Song system was built using American and French parts exported to China. Iraq purchased the encrypted - secure - fiber optic system from the Chinese Army in 1996. The Clinton administration authorized the exports of a secure, fiber optic, communication systems to China in 1994. According to the GAO, Clinton also authorized the export of an encrypted - secure - air control system directly to the Chinese Air Force using a Presidential waiver

The Sunday Times 12/20/98 William Rees-Mogg Nobody can be sure what the bombing campaign will achieve in Iraq there is some evidence, however, of what it is doing to a much more open society, the United States of America. The president raised the question in his address to the nation on Wednesday. He said the bombing was essential to the credibility of US power . A Washington Post opinion poll has already given part of the answer: 80% of Americans support the bombing 62% of Americans believe that the president's decision to bomb was influenced by the imminent threat of impeachment. The psychological state of the American people is more subtle and more complex than is shown either by the opinion polls or by the politicians. Both conservative Republican and liberal Democrat views of the president are minority opinions and these minorities are probably quite small

AP 12/20/98 The airstrikes on Iraq boosted Saddam Hussein's standing among fellow Arabs and made a dangerous conflict potentially more so, Arab commentators said Sunday in a rare consensus. From former U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf War to hard-liners, there was clear agreement in the Arab world that the U.S.-British operation was a big mistake. ``The strike ends, but Saddam remains,'' said the Saudi newspaper Okaz. A cartoon showed Saddam in an underground bunker, relaxing in an armchair with a cigar while watching TV coverage of the bombardment. Reaction elsewhere was muted at best, with leaders mostly expressing relief that the strikes were over and concern that the essential problem of containing Saddam remains. Only Japan and Australia expressed clear support for the mission. Even Kuwait - whose invasion by Iraq in 1990 triggered the Gulf War - refrained from outright support, saying merely that it ``welcomed the announcement'' that hostilities were over

The Pioneer 12/20/98 Shubha Singh Among the hundreds of cruise missiles that were fired at Iraq on Wednesday night, a couple of them fell in Khorramshahr town in Iran's Khuzestan province. There was some damage to property, but fortunately no resultant casualties in Iran. That is one of the problems of these high-tech weapons, fired from afar, they are not as accurate as their users would want them to be. Fired at Iraq, they land in Iran. Aimed at Afghanistan, they drop down in Pakistan. And then there is what the Americans term collateral damage. The ugly phrase meaning civilian deaths Bombing Iraq is an abuse of power, in the belief that there can be no retribution. This is the first time that the Security Council has been sidetracked so blatantly. Washington was so quick o send out its missiles that it did not even make the effort of getting support from anyone other than its closest ally, Britain, at the time of the attack. Even the other permanent members of the Security Council, which forms the elite core group, were not consulted

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 12/21/98 Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had, but declined, a chance to trap Bill Clinton in such a stark lie that it could have destroyed the president overnight, Time magazine reports this week. In its annual Man of the Year issue -- this year presenting the honor to men of the year Starr and Clinton -- the prosecutor told the magazine he passed up the chance because it seemed like the right thing to do. Before Clinton testified to the grand jury, Starr had received the results of DNA tests on the infamous stains from Monica Lewinsky's blue dress but was not legally obligated to inform the president he had them. The prosecutors had a choice: keep secret the results of the DNA analysis until after the president's testimony, or ... tip off the president before he swore his oath, Time said ..

World Net Daily 12/21/98 My additional concern is one which bothers many who care about our nation's security, he wrote. It is a concern for the effect which the pattern of deception by the president has had upon our military capability, and the effect it may have in the future if not checked. There is mounting evidence that this misleading of the nation is not confined to this one matter of sexual transgression and the ensuing cover-up. If the lack of veracity is allowed to stand unpunished, will not the president be emboldened to assume that he has successfully hamstrung the constitutional check and balance upon his power which would prevent betrayal of the country's trust? Would he then no longer need to fear exposure of far more serious matters whose possible presence is now only beginning to be revealed due to his skillful obstruction of their being fully known before now? Is there not evidence even now of such matters affecting national security?

USA TODAY 12/21/98 Jack Kelley ...BETHLEHEM, West Bank - The U.S. flags that lined the streets last week have been torched. The pictures of...Clinton that graced the walls of homes and shops have been ripped in two. Even the Christmas decorations that the first family hung on a tree have been taken down and smashed....''This honeymoon is over,'' said Jamal al-Hussein, 26, as he taped a poster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to his store wall....''Clinton told the Palestinian and Arab people 'America is with you.' Yet 48 hours later, he bombs Iraq. What a hypocrite. I'd like to slash his throat.''... Less than a week after his historic visit to Palestinian-controlled territories,...Clinton is being branded as ''Islam's No. 1 enemy'' here and across the West Bank for the U.S.-led airstrikes on Iraq....The four-day missile strikes, which ended Saturday, have touched off passionate feelings of Arab solidarity among Palestinians who, as in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, are openly supporting Saddam Hussein....

Washington Weekly 12/21/98 Marvin Lee As Congress prepared to vote on impeachment, the president took hostages in a bid to save his skin. Using the defiance of Saddam Hussein which he had tolerated for so many months, he ordered U.S. soldiers in harms way. While the president did not say so specifically, his allies in Congress did: if Republicans went ahead with their plans for impeachment, they would put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk. In the end, Republicans delayed their impeachment vote by just one day. In a 1995 interview, former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson said about President Clinton: You are not dealing with a normal person when you are dealing with Clinton. He is not controlled by character and truth, but by cunning instincts for survival and political expediency. Give him and inch and he will beat your brains out! He is capable of causing a Third World War, martial law, or whatever to maintain his position of power While the Russians were left in the dark, Clinton's allies at CNN had been told well in advance to have their star reporter at Baghdad with a nightscope camera and a satellite link to Atlanta. As the movie Wag the Dog illustrated, a war has no propaganda effect unless carefully choreographed for TV consumption

Washington weekly 12/21/98 Peter Mulhern The Clinton presidency grinds on toward its sordid conclusion. Bill Clinton barricades himself in the White House defying the forces of the law, firing missiles at Baghdad and shooting slime at his tormentors. James Cagney must have played this scene a dozen times. Clinton's degrading scene won't end, like a B Movie, in a hail of bullets. Instead it will end in a flurry of votes, the first of which will have been taken by the time you read this, unless, of course, the president declares martial law and invades Mexico. Since 1992 Democrats have been telling us that Bill Clinton's character flaws don't matter. Sure he's devious, dishonest, self-centered and sexually incontinent, but he's good for the economy and nobody bites their lower lip with more conviction. ..Clinton and his minions claim that we are bombing Iraq for reasons unrelated to the president's impeachment. Doubtless a good case can be made for the bombing without reference to domestic politics. But anyone who believes that this president did not attack Iraq for petty, personal reasons is a fool When the Clinton administration arranged to receive a report on Iraq's cooperation with UNSCOM that same week, the president knew that report would provide an excuse for military action. An honest report filed at any time in the last several years could not fail to provide such an excuse. In sum, Clinton arranged to have a reason for attacking Iraq at the very moment he might badly need a diversion to help him fight impeachment. He went to great lengths to avoid attacking Iraq for years, until such an attack served a compelling political purpose. Then he reversed field, manufactured a timely casus belli, and he struck ..

Robert Novak 12/21/98 On Dec. 9, United Nations weapons inspectors from UNSCOM, acting on a tip, showed up without notification at the Baghdad headquarters of the ruling Baath Party to search for ballistic missile components. The Iraqi escorts, citing a 1996 agreement, said only four inspectors could enter. Richard Butler, the imperious Australian who heads UNSCOM, ruled that the agreement was no longer in force and terminated the inspection because he wanted more inspectors to enter.That is the quality of six complaints cited by Butler in the report Clinton used as cause for war. Iraq barred a Dec. 4 inspection because it was the Muslim Sabbath (though previous inspections had gone forward on Fridays). Two weeks earlier, an UNSCOM helicopter was buzzed by an Iraqi helicopter ...These incidents reflect Saddam Hussein's obnoxious style but do not compare to more than 400 unimpeded inspections reported by Iraq since cooperation resumed Nov. 14. And they do not prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction claimed by the president but still not discovered by UNSCOM. Butler indignantly denied last week that he carries water for the Americans, but the U.S. government was alerted in advance to what last week's UNSCOM report would contain, As Clinton took Palestinian applause in Gaza last Monday, secret plans were underway for an air strike coinciding with the House impeachment vote. The president had time to consult with Congress and the U.N. Security Council but took no step that might stay his hand. As whenever a president pulls the trigger, Clinton's top national security advisers supported him. But majors and lieutenant colonels at the Pentagon, whose staff work undergirds any military intervention, are, in the words of a senior officer, 200 percent opposed. They disagree fundamentally. They know the attack on Iraq was planned long before Butler's report and consider it politically motivated

Meet The Press Transcript 12/21/98 ...MR. RUSSERT: When you say “ degraded,” what does that mean? He s— means he still has them, he still has biological and chemical weapons. SEC’ Y ALBRIGHT: Well, it’ s hard for us to say that everything is gone. But let me just go through some of the things that happened. There were 100 targets that were hit over four nights. There were 650 strike sorties, there were 400 cruise missiles delivered, and the destruction was heavy and devastating, as I said, to most of the targets that he holds the most dear, so that there were nine missile R& D facilities hit, 18 out of 19 of his weapons of mass destruction security aspects— that’ s the Republican Guard and his special concealment units— were destroyed. Twenty to twen— out of 21 command and control areas were damaged severely or destroyed and eight palaces. So when he claims he’ s victorious, that is sheer propaganda. MR. RUSSERT: But he has the capacity to rebuild very, very quickly. And if he, in fact, rebuilds all those sites, six months from now, up and running, what do we do? SEC’ Y ALBRIGHT: Well, we’ re back. And we have said very clearly that we reserve the right to use force again. And I think we’ ve proven our ability to deliver a very tough blow. MR. RUSSERT: The U.N. weapons inspectors were removed from Iraq. Saddam says they will never be allowed back in. That’ s real blow to us. SEC’ Y ALBRIGHT: Well, the truth, Tim, is that they have not been able to do their job effectively for the last eight months. They did a tremendous job before and, as we said many times, they were able to destroy more weapons than the Gulf War. But they have not been able to do their job effectively, and the truth is that if there is no way for the international community to monitor what he’ s doing through UNSCOM, then the sanctions will remain in place, and Saddam has to take some affirmative actions in order to let UNSCOM and the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, people back in.

Boston Globe 12/21/98 Fred Kaplan One question has emerged in the aftermath of President Clinton's four-day bombing campaign against Iraq: What was that all about? If his aim was to put a dent in Saddam Hussein's ability to produce chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, the dent was not a large one. If, as some of the air war's targets suggested, Clinton was trying to destabilize Hussein's regime, he did not hit its foundations hard enough. Speaking of the Pentagon's estimates of damage, John Pike, a specialist with the Federation of American Scientists, said Saturday night, ''It doesn't look like they did anything on what they said they were going to do, and not enough on what they were actually doing.'' According to the Pentagon's most recent figures, the attacks hit a total of 97 targets over the four days. The strikes damaged beyond repair only a few of the targets - the weapons sites, military headquarters, and industrial facilities that Pentagon planners thought had to be hit to accomplish the mission. ''I'm mystified why they stopped the campaign just as they had amassed sufficient force to complete the job,'' Pike added. More forces, including another aircraft-carrier battle-group and more than 70 additional combat planes, had just arrived Friday. ''You don't deploy 70 aircraft halfway around the world just so they can fly one combat sortie,'' Pike said. Iraq's nuclear and chemical materials were not attacked. Part of the reason might have been that nobody knew where these materials were. Andrew Cockburn, ... noted that the UN inspectors themselves ''couldn't find the stuff because Saddam kept moving it.'' So, Cockburn asked, ''If a bunch of people on the ground couldn't find it, how could some generals target it from the air?'' There are some well-known, immovable sites where chemical weapons could be built, but these are ''dual-use'' facilities - places with civilian functions as well, such as a chlorine plant vital to Baghdad's drinking water. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said the campaign was avoiding these targets so Iraqi people would not be hurt. The concern was laudable, but, given these limitations, it again raises the question: What did Clinton expect the bombing would accomplish? Cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs did strike some factories involved in producing missiles that could theoretically deliver chemical or nuclear weapons. The Pentagon said that 11 such targets were attacked. None were destroyed, one was damaged severely, five moderately, and four lightly. The damage to one target had not yet been assessed....General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Saturday that even these attacks had set back Iraq's ability to produce long-range missiles ''by at least a year.'' However, General Thomas Wilson, the Joint Staff's director of intelligence, said that even without the strikes, Iraq was a couple of years away from acquiring this ability....Missiles were also fired at facilities for the security forces that have guarded and hidden Hussein's weapons. These were the people who obstructed the UN inspectors. However, if the inspectors are no longer in Iraq - and it is doubtful that Hussein will let them back in soon - then their functions are no longer so vital. Furthermore, just because their facilities - barracks, headquarters, and so forth - were bombed does not mean the guards themselves were killed. Everyone agrees Hussein has become resourceful at moving his assets around on short notice. William M. Arkin, a military historian and former US Army intelligence officer, said of the strikes, ''I think we're hitting a lot of empty buildings.'' Strikes were also aimed at Hussein's command and control, TV and radio transmitters, Republican Guard facilities, private security forces - in other words, the apparatus that keeps him in power and maintains his links with the Iraqi army. These attacks, too, seemed fairly light. Of 20 command-control targets hit, seven were destroyed, four damaged severely, four moderately. Of nine Republican Guard targets hit, none were destroyed, three damaged severely, five moderately. Of 18 security targets hit, two were destroyed, five damaged severely, six moderately. Bombing rarely has much effect on these sorts of targets, no matter how heavy. During the 1991 Gulf war, American-led air forces mounted 500 strikes on command-control and 260 strikes on Iraq's leaders. Yet, ''despite the lethality and precision of the attacks,'' concluded the US Air Force's official five-volume ''Gulf War Air Power Survey,'' Hussein's ability to command his forces ''had not collapsed... The system turned out to be more redundant and more able to reconstitute itself.'' Perhaps Operation Desert Fox was called off for diplomatic reasons. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday night that he and Clinton ''always envisaged it would last four days ... because such a campaign is the right and proportionate response to Saddam's breach of UN obligations and also because of our sensitivity to the holy month of Ramadan.'' This claim is confusing, however, because the bombing continued into Ramadan, and it leaves unexplained the costly deployment of vast additional forces that did not arrive until the third and fourth days. In any event, yesterday morning, Hussein, who lived through it all once again, claimed victory - which, from his point of view, might outweigh Clinton's claim that the Iraqi leader stands ''degraded'' and ''diminished.''

[RaceBannon]

Wag the Dog Wiggles

Through the Timeline

December 22 1998 - January 14 1999

The Indian Express 12/22/98 TEHRAN: Another stray cruise missile from the U.S.-British strikes against Iraq has been found in Iran, a newspaper reported today. The missile landed in a barren area in the Southwestern border province of Khuzestan, the Jomhuri Islami newspaper reported. Iran, which condemned the four-night strikes that ended on Sunday, had strongly protested the accidental landing of another Iraq-bound missile on its territory last week, reports PTI

Reuters 12/22/98 China on Tuesday trumpeted its role in ending U.S. and British air strikes on Iraq and urged a return to negotiations with Baghdad aimed at resolving the U.N. arms inspection crisis. China made positive efforts in urging the U.S. and Britain to put an early end to the military action, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao. President Jiang Zemin delivered an oral message to President Bill Clinton and exchanged views over the telephone with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, elaborating on China's opposition to the use of force, Zhu said. He added that China opposed the use of force in international relations and called on the U.S. to seek a political solution to the crisis

Reuters 12/22/98 The United States is amenable to increasing the amount of oil Iraq can sell under the oil-for-food program, a U.S. official said Tuesday. Oil-for-food ... would be the one area where we could see perhaps the possibility of more forward movement, particularly if the humanitarian report indicated there was a greater need for food,'' Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering told a briefing on U.S. policy toward Iraq. Pickering noted that with the decline in the world price of oil, Iraq could not buy as much food at the same export level Freeper spartacus notes Let me see. We just bombed the hell out of them, (supposedly), now we agree to increase the amount of oil Saddam can sell

The Orange County Register 12/22/98 Alan W. Bock, Senior Editorial Writer One of the most over-the-top expressions of presidency worship came from retired New York Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore at a save-the-president rally in New York last week. I think of the millions of people who will suffer and die because the Republicans want to get President Clinton for a personal sin, said the apparently daft ecclesiastic a couple of days before the renowned peacemaker launched missiles

Reuters via Newsmax.com 12/22/98 Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov called yesterday for a strategic triangle with India and China, after Russia's bitter criticism of the four-day US and British blitz of Iraq. Primakov made clear that Russia would not back down from its condemnation of the strikes, and that it would also condemn any future offensive against Baghdad. ''We will never change our position. We are very negative about the use of force bypassing the Security Council,'' Primakov said in New Delhi. He said Russia, China and India should form a ''strategic triangle'' as a counterweight to US influence in the world. The decision by the United States and Britain to launch air raids without seeking approval from the UN Security Council infuriated Russia, which jealously guards its position as a permanent Security Council member.

Freeper Sandi 12/22/98 Center For Security Policy Decision Brief No.98-C 202 At present, it is unclear whether President Clinton's 'dog-wagging' bombing campaign against Iraq actually did degrade Iraq's weapon of mass destruction (WMD) programs. It certainly did not accomplish the systemic change -- the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime -- that would be necessary for any bomb-inflicted degradation to be more than a temporary setback for the Iraqi despot. What the seventy-hour air campaign did do, however, is: shatter the last vestiges of the Desert Storm-era coalition united in opposition to Saddam and end, apparently permanently, the on-the-ground inspections performed by the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM). As a result, it seems likely that the United Nations' mandated international sanctions regime -- a product of the former and renewed on the basis of unfavorable reports by the latter -- will not long survive.

The Village Voice 12/23-29/98 Jason Vest Was that a tomahawk missile in his pants or was Bill Clinton just happy to see Richard Butler's report? Even before the bombs actually rained down on Baghdad, cries of wag the dog went up from Capitol Hill to Dag Hammarskjö ld Plaza, and accusations characterizing the UNSCOM chairman as a geopolitical handmaiden to his beleaguered American patron began to fly like lethal airborne ordnance. Such speculation was hardly untoward: As former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter ably demonstrated earlier this year, Butler does seem to take the Clinton administration's input more seriously than that of his UN bosses. In another vein, it was on the same day Monica Lewinsky gave her grand jury testimony that Clinton commenced an utterly unnecessary bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan under the pretext of immediate clear and present danger. And, if we reach a little further into the recess of memory, we recall that it was on the eve of Gennifer Flowers's revelations in 1992 that then governor Clinton returned to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a retarded African American .It's always been hard to say what's more amazing about Clinton: his willingness to use his office for self-gain, or his ability to simultaneously co-opt Republican positions and get his fellow Democrats to abandon traditional principles in the name of defending his perpetually imperiled posterior. During the Judiciary Committee's proceedings, for example, New York's Jerrold Nadler held that LBJ should have been impeached for deceiving Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution rather than publicly pondering if a similar standard might apply to Clinton's attacks on Iraq and Sudan, Nadler, like so many other Democrats, rallied round the flagpole

AFP 12/25/98 Iraq wants Arab governments to take heed of demonstrations of support for Iraq which have taken place in their countries, the official INA news agency reported. The official Arab position should reflect the slogans chanted by Arab masses, INA said, in its report on the meeting. The participants expressed profound satisfaction at the position demonstrated by the masses against the agression - an allusion to four days of air strikes by US and British planes against Iraq last week. Also on Thursday, Iraq vowed never to allow the return of UN arms inspectors in the face of deep rifts at the UN Security Council over how to deal with Saddam Hussein....

[RaceBannon]

Wag the Dog Wiggles

Through the Timeline

December 15 -21 1998

Operation Desert Fox

December 15, 1998

UPI Spotlight 12/15/98 Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., says (Tuesday) the momentum in the House is in favor of impeaching President Clinton. Lieberman says he himself would favor a Senate trial even though he acknowledged that a senator could offer ``a motion to dismiss or adjourn.'' He would not do so, he said, adding, ``I want to review the evidence.''

Reuters 12/15/98 Alan Elsner Throughout his six years in office, President Clinton has lived and died by public opinion polls but his dependence on popular support will become more critical than ever if he is impeached this week. With the House of Representatives seeming more and more likely to impeach him, Clinton might expect to come under unprecedented pressure to resign and spare the nation a protracted trial in the Senate. A Washington Post-ABC poll published Tuesday found that 58 percent of respondents thought Clinton ought to resign rather than fight removal in a Senate trial. But several political analysts and pollsters contacted by Reuters predicted that public support for Clinton might harden if he is impeachment, and said he would have many reasons to fight on. ``We're all looking for some softening in support for Clinton but it's not there yet,'' said Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center, who criticized the wording of the Washington Post-ABC poll question as confusing. ``You can't take the public for granted. Things might change. But the public has stuck with him through everything throughout this scandal,'' Kohut said....

Reuters 12/15/98 U.S. military forces in the Gulf have been put on high alert based on significant, credible evidence'' of possible imminent terrorist action against Americans in the area, the Pentagon said Tuesday.The statement by Defense Department spokesman Ken Bacon in response to questions from reporters came a day after the State Department said U.S. diplomats and citizens in seven Gulf states could be in danger from attack, possibly in the next 30 days. Most of our forces in the Gulf are now in a threat condition called 'Charlie', which is the third out of four threat conditions,'' Bacon said. The definition of 'ThreatCon Charlie' is that an incident has occurred or intelligence has been received indicating that some form of terrorist action is imminent.''...

Drudge Report 12/15/98 Matt Drudge 22:29:48 UTC SOURCES: CLINTON TOLD ON AIR FORCE ONE THAT HE CURRENTLY DOES NOT HAVE THE VOTES TO DEFEAT IMPEACHMENT IN THE HOUSE. 223 MEMBERS ARE NOW PREDICTED TO VOTE FOR ONE OR ALL OF COMMITTEE ARTICLES. NUMBERS COULD STILL SHIFT, WARN CONGRESSIONAL COUNTERS. BUT IT BECAME CLEAR LATE TUESDAY THAT A MAJORITY HAS LIKELY BEEN REACHED.

FOX 12/15/98 Chief U.N. arms inspector Richard Butler apparently has concluded that Iraq has not restored full cooperation with his weapons experts, diplomats said Tuesday.Butler, ..., hand-delivered his crucial report to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan late Tuesday. Diplomats described the document as drawing negative'' conclusions about Iraq's cooperation with arms inspections, which Baghdad first limited on Aug. 5 and halted on Oct. 31. The inspectors returned to Iraq on Nov. 14. Butler's report could provide a basis for possible U.S.-British air strikes against Iraq, which both countries have said could be conducted without any further diplomatic consultations or warnings. In contrast, the diplomats said a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), responsible for nuclear disarmament, gave a positive evaluation of Baghdad's compliance in allowing inspections. Butler's report, expected to be released late Tuesday or Wednesday, is to determine whether the Security Council will conduct a comprehensive review of its relations with Iraq that Baghdad hopes will eventually lead to a lifting of U.N. sanctions in force since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Baghdad has allowed a number of inspections without incident, but it halted three of them and has turned over only one of the 12 weapons-related documents Butler requested. The most serious standoff was on Dec. 10 when UNSCOM contended it was blocked from entering the ruling Baath party offices unless it limited inspectors to four and said in advance what the group was seeking. UNSCOM has also complained it was barred on Nov. 26 from a military base of the People's Mujahedeen, an Iranian opposition group. And Friday, a Baghdad-based chemical monitoring team was prevented from inspecting a warehouse on grounds that it was the Muslim Sabbath. In Washington, State Department spokesman James Foley, in apparent anticipation of Butler's report, said all of these incidents are simply unacceptable.'' Iraq submitted its own detailed analysis of the inspectors' actions Monday, saying that the teams were able to interview all individuals required and to reach all the sites they wished to inspect.'' But the report, obtained by Reuters, accused several teams, including one led by Australian Roger Hill, in charge of concealment activities, of carrying out its work in an ''intrusive and provocative manner,'' even inspecting a private residence in an effort to provoke Iraq. Baghdad halted cooperation with UNSCOM on grounds that it served Washington's interests by refusing to declare that Iraq's forbidden chemical, biological and ballistic potential had been eliminated. Clearances from UNSCOM and from the Vienna-based IAEA are a key requirement for ending the stringent economic sanctions.

December 16, 1998

AP 12/16/98 Waiel Faleh Anti-aircraft guns opened fire in Baghdad early Thursday, and U.S. and British officials announced they had launched a series of airstrikes. No attacking planes or missiles were immediately seen over the Iraqi capital. The Iraqi blasts created loud explosions, violently shaking the glass windows of the Information Ministry building near the center of Baghdad where foreign reporters are based. Orange glows streaked toward the sky as the anti-aircraft guns let loose volley after volley of shots. The explosions begin about 12:49 a.m. Thursday (4:49 p.m. EST Wednesday). A barrage of blasts lighted the sky several hours after the Clinton administration warned that it would make a military strike against Iraq at any time. President Clinton ordered airstrikes on Iraq over a protracted impasse with Iraq over U.N. weapons inspections just minutes before the blasts began. Less than an hour later, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the British had participated in the airstrikes. Earlier in the day, long lines formed outside Baghdad gas stations and customers cursed Clinton for planning an attack before the holy Islamic month of Ramadan, which is expected to begin Sunday....Few people were out at the time of the explosions and and few cars were on the streets of the capital. Air raid sirens sounded briefly in Baghdad shortly before midnight local time. Earlier, Iraqi television interrupted regular programming to play patriotic music and footage of Iraqi commandos training with machine guns, hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Any strike would come from the Persian Gulf, where the United States has 24,100 military men and women. There also are 22 warships, including eight with Tomahawk cruise missiles, and 201 aircraft, including 72 on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. Britain has 22 strike aircraft in the region. Earlier Wednesday, three trucks loaded with luggage left the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. About a half-hour later, three busloads of weapons inspectors also left the U.N. compound, followed by four white U.N. cars carrying spare tires on top. ...Iraq says it has complied with every U.N. demand, and accuses Butler of prolonging the inspections at the behest of the United States.On Tuesday, Butler gave a report to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in which he said Iraq's claim to be free of banned weapons cannot be accepted without further verification.'' But verification is impossible as Iraq is obstructing the inspectors, he said.

Reuters 12/16/98 The air strikes against Iraq will probably give President Clinton a brief boost in U.S. public opinion, but while they will delay the process of his impeachment, they will not derail it, analysts said Wednesday. There will be a 36-hour bounce for the president as the nation rallies around our military personnel, but it will only be temporary, and we will then get back to business in the impeachment debate,'' pollster John Zogby said. Clinton ordered the air strikes on Iraq after Baghdad refused to cooperate with U.N. inspectors trying to find and destroy Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The strikes began a day before the House of Representatives was due to debate and vote on articles of impeachment charging Clinton with perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power. Republican leaders decided to delay that debate for a day or two. But some senior Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, immediately questioned Clinton's motives in launching the attack. I cannot support this military action in the Persian Gulf at this time,'' Lott, a Mississippi Republican, said. Both the timing and the policy are subject to question.'' He was supported by some House Republicans and Georgia Sen. Paul Coverdell. But most other Republican senators said they strongly backed the military action.... Political scientist Gary Jacobson of the University of California, San Diego, said Lott's attack demonstrated the level of distrust between Clinton and Republicans, which he said was virtually unprecedented in U.S. history.... If the Republicans do face a backlash, it will be in elections of the year 2000,'' he said. Pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center said Republicans were taking a big risk by questioning the president during a military operation. Lott's statement was very ill-advised and won't help the Republicans. Americans want bipartisanship to prevail during foreign crises,'' he said. He said he did not expect much change in Clinton's already high approval ratings but thought Republican unpopularity, already growing in recent weeks, could deepen. Clinton seemed certain to face criticism, both at home and abroad, for the timing of the Iraq attack. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who served in the Republican administration of George Bush, said that even if the attack was necessary, the timing was questionable. Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul went so far as to say that Clinton's action in attacking Iraq was itself illegal and possibly impeachable. This is an outrage, and we shouldn't be participating in it. We should not permit our president to do this. It's very dangerous. It has nothing to do with national security,'' Paul said. As a matter of fact, I think waging war without congressional approval is an impeachable act.''

AP 12/16/98 Darlene Superville Rep. Bob Livingston knew he wouldn't have a trouble-free move into the House speaker's chair, but the explosion of events Wednesday quickly brought home the magnitude of the role he is about to assume. As the House began to complete plans for a debate Thursday on articles of impeachment against President Clinton, the White House ordered military airstrikes on Iraq for Saddam Hussein's repeated defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors. The decision pre-empted the impeachment debate for the time being as House Republicans reluctantly agreed to a brief delay. It also left Clinton's GOP critics frustrated by the fact that he may have outsmarted them yet again. Livingston, R-La., said that while Clinton may have won for the moment, the impeachment process will move forward in the House and soon. The coincidence of that legislation and the action of our government is unique. That's all I'll say about that,'' a displeased Livingston said after emerging from a closed meeting with the GOP rank-and-file. But in the interest of support of our troops, we think that tomorrow the only thing that we need do is go forward and pass a resolution of support for our troops.'' Instead of a debate heavy with the constitutional and other implications of impeachment, the House on Thursday will vote on a resolution supporting U.S. troops participating in Operation Desert Fox.'' Republicans support the effort to contain Saddam, Livingston said. But he made it clear that the impeachment process would not be derailed. We reserve our right to take our constitutional action under the impeachment clause of the Constitution, and we reserve our right within the next few days to complete the business that brought us here in these last few hours,'' he said. Livingston tried, albeit unrealistically, to assume the speaker's post without controversy. The action against Iraq was unforeseen, but impeachment was shaping up to be all his, particularly since the current speaker, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., practically withdrew from the scene after announcing he would leave Congress. Livingston appeared to have succeeded in his plans to lie low during the impeachment debate until last weekend, however, when he said the House would not vote on any resolution to censure the president. He said such action would violate the careful balance of separation of powers.''

12/17/98 Freeper GoodSense, MSNBC, On thursday nights broadcast, Tibble, the on-the-spot fireworks commentator for MSNBC remarked that he had just arrived across the border just seven days ago.

AP 12/17/98 VIENNA, Austria -- Not all U.N. weapons inspectors are down on Iraq. The agency investigating Iraq's nuclear program says it has run into far fewer problems than Richard Butler's inspection teams. Butler's U.N. Special Commission, known as UNSCOM, rejects Baghdad's claims it has destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction, and he accuses Iraq of obstructing teams trying to verify their elimination. UNSCOM inspects and monitors chemical and biological weapons programs as well as those involving long-range missiles. The International Atomic Energy Agency, on the other hand, has said it believes Iraq no longer has much to hide in the area of nuclear weapons. The IAEA, based in Vienna, has given Iraq fairly good marks, saying it has provided ``the necessary level of cooperation'' to enable the nuclear inspectors to complete their work ``efficiently and effectively.'' But IAEA officials say their job has been easier than that of UNSCOM, and therefore less confrontational....

NY Times 12/18/98 JOHN M. BRODER with BARBARA CROSSETTE ...The president and senior administration officials said that Clinton had not made the final decision to unleash a barrage of missiles and bombs on targets across Iraq until Tuesday, hours after receiving the report by Richard Butler, the weapons inspector. But a full two days earlier, Butler had informed Clinton what he intended to say in his report, and when he would say it. And the president issued a highly classified order to the Pentagon on Sunday morning that began a 72-hour countdown to the air assault....But Butler's report was in many ways a simple formality. Officials in New York and Washington said that there was little in the Butler report that had not been available to American officials days, even weeks, earlier. Military plans and hardware were already in place for raids that could have come at any time after Dec. 1....

Minneapolis Star Tribune 12/18/98 Acting on early word from the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, President Clinton set in motion Wednesday's military strike two days before Richard Butler formally told the Security Council that Saddam Hussein again was in defiance of the United Nations, senior administration officials said Thursday. They said that Clinton had not made the final decision to attack Iraq until Tuesday, hours after receiving Butler's report. But two days earlier, Butler had informed Clinton what he intended to say and when he would say it. And the president issued an order to the Pentagon on Sunday morning that began a 72-hour countdown to the assault. The report was delivered to the Security Council and U.S. officials as Clinton was flying home Tuesday from the Middle East. About two hours into the 10-hour flight from Jerusalem, he gave the order to U.S. forces to be prepared to strike within 24 hours But Butler's report was in many ways a formality. Officials at the United Nations and in Washington said that there was little in it that had not been available to U.S. officials days, even weeks, earlier. Military plans and hardware already were in place for raids that could have begun at any time after Dec. 1. The timing of the strikes - on the eve of the House impeachment vote - sparked protests by Republicans who accused Clinton of orchestrating a crisis to slow the momentum toward impeachment

AP 12/18/98 ... The calls went out to Capitol Hill. From Hillary Rodham Clinton. From Vice President Al Gore. From President Clinton himself. White House officials could not - or would not - say whether the trio's high-powered telephone lobbying campaign won over any House members contemplating a ``yes'' vote on Clinton's impeachment...Much like her efforts at earlier crisis points in the Lewinsky scandal, Mrs. Clinton joined the White House telephone campaign to beat back a surge of impeachment sentiment in Congress.... By day, she consulted with historians and constitutional experts, her spokeswoman said, but was not preparing to make any public appeal on the matter. ``She's talked to members'' of Congress, said spokeswoman Marsha Berry. ``She's talked to folks who are experts on our Constitution and historians, other folks in that area. She's concerned. It's an issue she takes seriously. She's one who likes to have a lot of information.'' Gore also went back to the phones lobbying House members, an aide said, for ``a good chunk of the morning.'' Clinton himself called a handful of House Democrats to discuss their strategy for the debate and vote. Clinton would not concede defeat in the House until the final roll call, press secretary Joe Lockhart said. ``On a vote this important and this solemn, yes, there's always a chance.'' Today, official duties would offer distraction from his peril on Capitol Hill. The president was meeting with European Union leaders to review trade tensions, working on next year's budget with his economic team and meeting with his HIV/AIDS advisory panel....

Saturday, Dec. 19, 1998

AP 12/19/98 William Jefferson Clinton will be forever marked as only the second president ever impeached, struck low by sexual indiscretions and many months of legal deception. The legacy he fretted over so much and worked so hard to build is indelibly stained. The president's struggle for achievements in his last two years in office - if he survives at all - will be waged against long odds and a backdrop of unrelenting partisanship that strike many Americans as spinning out of control. Surely history will be struck by the bewildering hostilities that strew casualties across the political battlefield of 1998, Republican and Democrat alike. ... The House impeached Clinton on Saturday for perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice and sent his case to the Senate for trial. It rejected articles accusing him of perjury in a civil lawsuit and abuse of power. Can Clinton wage a successful battle for survival in a Senate trial as did President Andrew Johnson in 1868? Will the public turn and clamor for his resignation, forcing him to resign as Richard Nixon did 24 years ago even before the House took up articles of impeachment against him? Will political wisemen - a Bob Dole, Bob Strauss or other elders - emerge with a compromise of censure to save the country from more tumoil? With an impeachment vote that seemed unthinkable after Republican election losses in November, the nation plunges into uncertainty - unlike anything Americans have seen in 130 years. The stakes are huge.... Already a bipartisan tradition on national security has been strained by GOP suspicions of Clinton's motivation in Iraq policy.... The capital's bitter mood was underscored by the sour cynicism that greeted Clinton's decision to launch airstrikes against Iraq on the eve of the scheduled impeachment vote. Even with Clinton tarred by impeachment, there is debate about the future of his presidency and what he can accomplish. ``He's had nine lives or 12 lives or 14 lives,'' said Tom Cronin, president of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. ``Clinton watchers are not going to rule him out. He's maybe a lame, lame duck but he's still president. In three months he'll be viewed as a different president because he's been impeached but we'll be back to business as usual.'' But historian Dallek said, ``For the last two years of his presidency, his authority is largely shot. Of course he has the nominal powers of the office. He can veto bills. He is commander in chief. ``Can he achieve anything of a far-reaching nature? It's hard to believe this Republican Congress is going to follow his lead on anything important,'' Dallek said. ``In the long term, his legacy is blighted by this scandal....''

AP 12/19/98 Jocelyn Noveck Throwing stones, burning flags and even breaking into a U.S. ambassador's home, protesters throughout the Arab world joined Saturday in a bitter wave of anger over the airstrikes on Iraq. A common theme of the protests was that all Arabs — not just Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein — are being targeted by the U.S. and British attacks. The aggression on Iraq is an aggression on the whole Arab nation,'' said Aziza Fadhel, a university student in the Syrian capital, Damascus ..In a rare protest in the Syrian capital, thousands marched through downtown Damascus on Saturday, and about 1,000 people — most of them students — attacked the U.S. Embassy, its nearby residence and the American Cultural Center

Reuters 12/19/98 FoxNews U.S. and British forces launched a fourth night of air strikes against Iraq Saturday, the first day of Islam's holy month of Ramadan, as Baghdad vowed to resist the attacks until its last citizen.'' Anti-aircraft fire lit the sky over the Iraqi capital, mostly over its southeastern outskirts, for about 30 minutes, ending around 7.15 p.m. (1615 GMT). It resumed around two hours later and witnesses reported at least one missile hitting the city. I tell you all that Iraq will continue to defend its land, policy and dignity...We will fight until the last citizen,'' Iraqi Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan told a news conference in Baghdad. He also said the mission of U.N. inspectors charged with destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was over. It was Baghdad's alleged obstruction of the inspector's work that triggered the U.S. and British strikes

AFP 12/19/98 TEHRAN .British and US troops entered Iraqi territory on Friday night across the Saudi border, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported Saturday. Citing informed sources in Khoramshahr, a town bordering Iraq in southwestern Iran, the news agency said the troops had advanced five kilometres (three miles) into Iraqi territory. The sources, which were not further identified, were unable to say whether or not the troops had remained in Iraq. An Iraqi information ministry official said Friday that Saudi armoured units had advanced to the Iraqi border the previous day on an apparent reconnaissance mission before pulling back

Electronic Telegraph 12/20/98 Mark Steyn FOR months now the refrain of Bill Clinton's defenders has been: everyone does it. Birds do it, bees do it, even Republican Speaker nominees do it. And Bob Livingston doesn't do it by halves: as it emerged this week, he's committed not one but a ton of infidelities. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, cried the Democrats. And yesterday Mr Livingston did, casting his stone smack in his own crotch and resigning the Speakership. For two days, Democrats had denounced the Republicans for leading a Right-wing coup d'etat . But when was the last time a coup leader assassinated himself? ...But that is what it has come to in the Lyin' King's Washington: you can't tell the difference between the President of the United States and the publisher of Hustler. Somehow all political life has now taken on the character of Mr Clinton's sexual proclivities. There is going to be a trial, declared Gloria Borger on CBS News. It may not go to completion. Completion is not a legal term but the Starr Report's formulation for what the President, er, rarely reaches. Likewise, for a couple of days we had a war, but that too is not going to completion. That's why Saddam, also taking his cue from Mr Clinton's sexual behaviour, declined to reciprocate. Why waste your own men and resources when the Great Satan's just going through the motions for a few nights? Though both men would be insulted by the comparison, they're not dissimilar: one scoffs at Unscom inspection requests, the other at the Independent Counsel's subpoenas. One pretends to be surprised when chemical weapons suddenly turn up, the other when Whitewater billing records or White House coffee-morning videos suddenly turn up. The only difference is that Bill Clinton's weapon of mass destruction has been turned against him and that Saddam isn't so foolish as to let UN inspectors come across a cocktail dress with a telltale anthrax stain. Yet in one crucial respect Mr Clinton has reached completion: his credibility has been well and truly spent. The White House, suddenly fearful of Senate numbers, is now scrambling for any compromise: my own choice is the Canaan Banana solution, whereby the President grabs a false beard and forged papers and hightails it. Meanwhile, Mr Clinton is running out of distractions. What was interesting this week was how quickly the novelty of bombing Saddam wore off. Forced to choose between air strikes on Baghdad and the ongoing consequences of his glandular urges, caught between Iraq and a hard place, most news organisations quickly decided the real story was the impeachment. You can't blame them. In January, just after Monica broke, the Commander-in-Chief, with his loyal sidekick Tony the Boy Wonder, gave Saddam an ultimatum and ordered a billion-dollar build-up in the Gulf in August, after his historic First Apology flopped, he bombed a Sudanese aspirin factory this week, he ordered air strikes against Baghdad. No doubt, on the first day of the Senate trial, he'll launch all-out nuclear Armageddon. But, for the most part, you can't help noticing how ineffectual these curiously timely initiatives are. The Middle East peace accords he staged before November's elections are all but dead. The Palestinians waving American flags on Monday had by Thursday reverted to their traditional pastime of burning them. Something else changed this week. Bob Livingston's fleet of mistresses may sell a few extra copies of Hustler, but the revelations only emphasised how Bill Clinton is still fighting the last war. Even before yesterday's bombshell resignation, the Republicans' big success in Friday's debate was in finally making the issue not the sex, not the lying about sex, but the crimes. Indeed, throughout this long first year of post-non coital investigation, Mr Clinton has given respectable old-school adulterers such as Mr Livingston a bad name. It may be time for sexist swingers to explain that his behaviour is not consistent with minimum standards of philandering....

Newsletter 12/20/98 Mr. Kim Weissman More than two years ago, Jerome Zeifman, the democrat chief counselto the House Judiciary Committee which acted to impeach President Nixon,came to the conclusion that there is now probable cause to consider ourpresident and first lady as felons , he saw a pattern or deceit and corruption , he saw his party, the Democratic Party, as defenders of acorrupt administration , and he concluded that there was a cancer on the Clinton presidency painfully reminiscent of the cancer that broughtdown Nixon . Two years after Jerome Zeifman made his disillusionmentpublic, the democrat party, in Zeifman's prophetic words spoken twoyears ago, continues the folly of marching in lockstep in support of acorrupt president in the name of party unity. On a completely partisanvote, virtually every democrat marched in lockstep in defense of BillClinton, voting on the Articles of Impeachment

New York Post 12/20/98 Dick Morris There is no functional difference between initiating bombing and continuing bombing during Ramadan. So why did he bomb before the impeachment vote? Clinton knew that it wouldn't sway any votes, and he knew that delaying the impeachment vote by a few days would have no consequence. But two political reasons now come into focus for his decision to bomb when he did. Clinton knew that after the impeachment vote, demands for his resignation would mount. He likely has been thrown into a panic by polls which showed the sentiment for resignation would rise after impeachment. By demonstrating his retention of presidential authority and willingness to use it dramatically, he could defuse the case for resignation. In addition, the prolific use of the don't impeach while the bombs are falling argument by House Democrats in the impeachment debate raises suspicions that he may have initiated the bombing to give the Democrats a talking point during the debate. That way, they would spend less time talking about sex or perjury and more time talking about patriotism. In general, Bill Clinton has tried to project the image of being very busy .How can you even think about asking him to resign? Don't you see how busy he is? Don't you see how fully engaged he is as president despite the specter of impeachment? Are you a fool? A few weeks ago, Clinton likely decided that impeachment was inevitable, but so was Senate acquittal ..

The Orlando Sentinel 12/20/98 Charley Reese In a season in which Christians celebrate the son of God's message of peace and love, Clinton has forced the American military to kill innocent people in Iraq to distract the American public from Clinton's own law-breaking Clinton is an evil man. His administration is corrupt from one end to the other and is riddled with liars. The decision to bomb Iraq was clearly designed to postpone the impeachment vote. It was a put-up job from start to finish. Note these facts: Iraq did not throw the arms inspectors out. Richard Butler, the little weasel and stooge for Clinton, deliberately set up a confrontation by trying to crash his way into the Ba'ath political party headquarters, knowing that he would be refused. What, after all, did he expect to find? A missile in a file cabinet? Then Butler ordered his minions out of the country on his own, without consulting the United Nations Security Council or the secretary-general, and filed a one-sided report. Clinton then ordered the attack before the Security Council could even finish discussing the report. In a demonic way, Clinton is sewing the seeds of war, hatred and death. The bombing of Iraq is an act of American terrorism, pure and simple. Unfortunately, innocent Americans will reap the bloody harvest. Clinton has no policy .. More and more America seems surreal. People no longer know right from wrong. Television treats war like just another show ( We'll be right back to tell you more about the killing after these messages. ) Ignorance and malice have replaced education and civility. A recent survey showed a huge majority of American high-school students are liars, cheats and thieves. Absent a religious revival, I wouldn't give you 2 cents for the future of this country. Merry Christmas

E-Mail 12/20/98 Charles Smith The Pentagon -U.S. war-planners are not all that happy with operation DESERT FOX. The strike was telegraphed to Iraq far in advance and mostof the Iraqi mobile Surface to Air missile (SAM) units escapeddamage. The prime target for U.S. strikes, the IraqiIntegrated Air Defense network (NATO code-name Tiger Song ), suffered no major damage and appears to have lost no missile units. The only real hard target kills that can be claimed are a few attack helicopters destroyed at a northern Iraqi air-base. Ironically, the Iraqi Tiger Song system was built using American and French parts exported to China. Iraq purchased the encrypted - secure - fiber optic system from the Chinese Army in 1996. The Clinton administration authorized the exports of a secure, fiber optic, communication systems to China in 1994. According to the GAO, Clinton also authorized the export of an encrypted - secure - air control system directly to the Chinese Air Force using a Presidential waiver

The Sunday Times 12/20/98 William Rees-Mogg Nobody can be sure what the bombing campaign will achieve in Iraq there is some evidence, however, of what it is doing to a much more open society, the United States of America. The president raised the question in his address to the nation on Wednesday. He said the bombing was essential to the credibility of US power . A Washington Post opinion poll has already given part of the answer: 80% of Americans support the bombing 62% of Americans believe that the president's decision to bomb was influenced by the imminent threat of impeachment. The psychological state of the American people is more subtle and more complex than is shown either by the opinion polls or by the politicians. Both conservative Republican and liberal Democrat views of the president are minority opinions and these minorities are probably quite small

AP 12/20/98 The airstrikes on Iraq boosted Saddam Hussein's standing among fellow Arabs and made a dangerous conflict potentially more so, Arab commentators said Sunday in a rare consensus. From former U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf War to hard-liners, there was clear agreement in the Arab world that the U.S.-British operation was a big mistake. ``The strike ends, but Saddam remains,'' said the Saudi newspaper Okaz. A cartoon showed Saddam in an underground bunker, relaxing in an armchair with a cigar while watching TV coverage of the bombardment. Reaction elsewhere was muted at best, with leaders mostly expressing relief that the strikes were over and concern that the essential problem of containing Saddam remains. Only Japan and Australia expressed clear support for the mission. Even Kuwait - whose invasion by Iraq in 1990 triggered the Gulf War - refrained from outright support, saying merely that it ``welcomed the announcement'' that hostilities were over

The Pioneer 12/20/98 Shubha Singh Among the hundreds of cruise missiles that were fired at Iraq on Wednesday night, a couple of them fell in Khorramshahr town in Iran's Khuzestan province. There was some damage to property, but fortunately no resultant casualties in Iran. That is one of the problems of these high-tech weapons, fired from afar, they are not as accurate as their users would want them to be. Fired at Iraq, they land in Iran. Aimed at Afghanistan, they drop down in Pakistan. And then there is what the Americans term collateral damage. The ugly phrase meaning civilian deaths Bombing Iraq is an abuse of power, in the belief that there can be no retribution. This is the first time that the Security Council has been sidetracked so blatantly. Washington was so quick o send out its missiles that it did not even make the effort of getting support from anyone other than its closest ally, Britain, at the time of the attack. Even the other permanent members of the Security Council, which forms the elite core group, were not consulted

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 12/21/98 Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had, but declined, a chance to trap Bill Clinton in such a stark lie that it could have destroyed the president overnight, Time magazine reports this week. In its annual Man of the Year issue -- this year presenting the honor to men of the year Starr and Clinton -- the prosecutor told the magazine he passed up the chance because it seemed like the right thing to do. Before Clinton testified to the grand jury, Starr had received the results of DNA tests on the infamous stains from Monica Lewinsky's blue dress but was not legally obligated to inform the president he had them. The prosecutors had a choice: keep secret the results of the DNA analysis until after the president's testimony, or ... tip off the president before he swore his oath, Time said ..

World Net Daily 12/21/98 My additional concern is one which bothers many who care about our nation's security, he wrote. It is a concern for the effect which the pattern of deception by the president has had upon our military capability, and the effect it may have in the future if not checked. There is mounting evidence that this misleading of the nation is not confined to this one matter of sexual transgression and the ensuing cover-up. If the lack of veracity is allowed to stand unpunished, will not the president be emboldened to assume that he has successfully hamstrung the constitutional check and balance upon his power which would prevent betrayal of the country's trust? Would he then no longer need to fear exposure of far more serious matters whose possible presence is now only beginning to be revealed due to his skillful obstruction of their being fully known before now? Is there not evidence even now of such matters affecting national security?

USA TODAY 12/21/98 Jack Kelley ...BETHLEHEM, West Bank - The U.S. flags that lined the streets last week have been torched. The pictures of...Clinton that graced the walls of homes and shops have been ripped in two. Even the Christmas decorations that the first family hung on a tree have been taken down and smashed....''This honeymoon is over,'' said Jamal al-Hussein, 26, as he taped a poster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to his store wall....''Clinton told the Palestinian and Arab people 'America is with you.' Yet 48 hours later, he bombs Iraq. What a hypocrite. I'd like to slash his throat.''... Less than a week after his historic visit to Palestinian-controlled territories,...Clinton is being branded as ''Islam's No. 1 enemy'' here and across the West Bank for the U.S.-led airstrikes on Iraq....The four-day missile strikes, which ended Saturday, have touched off passionate feelings of Arab solidarity among Palestinians who, as in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, are openly supporting Saddam Hussein....

Washington Weekly 12/21/98 Marvin Lee As Congress prepared to vote on impeachment, the president took hostages in a bid to save his skin. Using the defiance of Saddam Hussein which he had tolerated for so many months, he ordered U.S. soldiers in harms way. While the president did not say so specifically, his allies in Congress did: if Republicans went ahead with their plans for impeachment, they would put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk. In the end, Republicans delayed their impeachment vote by just one day. In a 1995 interview, former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson said about President Clinton: You are not dealing with a normal person when you are dealing with Clinton. He is not controlled by character and truth, but by cunning instincts for survival and political expediency. Give him and inch and he will beat your brains out! He is capable of causing a Third World War, martial law, or whatever to maintain his position of power While the Russians were left in the dark, Clinton's allies at CNN had been told well in advance to have their star reporter at Baghdad with a nightscope camera and a satellite link to Atlanta. As the movie Wag the Dog illustrated, a war has no propaganda effect unless carefully choreographed for TV consumption

Washington weekly 12/21/98 Peter Mulhern The Clinton presidency grinds on toward its sordid conclusion. Bill Clinton barricades himself in the White House defying the forces of the law, firing missiles at Baghdad and shooting slime at his tormentors. James Cagney must have played this scene a dozen times. Clinton's degrading scene won't end, like a B Movie, in a hail of bullets. Instead it will end in a flurry of votes, the first of which will have been taken by the time you read this, unless, of course, the president declares martial law and invades Mexico. Since 1992 Democrats have been telling us that Bill Clinton's character flaws don't matter. Sure he's devious, dishonest, self-centered and sexually incontinent, but he's good for the economy and nobody bites their lower lip with more conviction. ..Clinton and his minions claim that we are bombing Iraq for reasons unrelated to the president's impeachment. Doubtless a good case can be made for the bombing without reference to domestic politics. But anyone who believes that this president did not attack Iraq for petty, personal reasons is a fool When the Clinton administration arranged to receive a report on Iraq's cooperation with UNSCOM that same week, the president knew that report would provide an excuse for military action. An honest report filed at any time in the last several years could not fail to provide such an excuse. In sum, Clinton arranged to have a reason for attacking Iraq at the very moment he might badly need a diversion to help him fight impeachment. He went to great lengths to avoid attacking Iraq for years, until such an attack served a compelling political purpose. Then he reversed field, manufactured a timely casus belli, and he struck ..

Robert Novak 12/21/98 On Dec. 9, United Nations weapons inspectors from UNSCOM, acting on a tip, showed up without notification at the Baghdad headquarters of the ruling Baath Party to search for ballistic missile components. The Iraqi escorts, citing a 1996 agreement, said only four inspectors could enter. Richard Butler, the imperious Australian who heads UNSCOM, ruled that the agreement was no longer in force and terminated the inspection because he wanted more inspectors to enter.That is the quality of six complaints cited by Butler in the report Clinton used as cause for war. Iraq barred a Dec. 4 inspection because it was the Muslim Sabbath (though previous inspections had gone forward on Fridays). Two weeks earlier, an UNSCOM helicopter was buzzed by an Iraqi helicopter ...These incidents reflect Saddam Hussein's obnoxious style but do not compare to more than 400 unimpeded inspections reported by Iraq since cooperation resumed Nov. 14. And they do not prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction claimed by the president but still not discovered by UNSCOM. Butler indignantly denied last week that he carries water for the Americans, but the U.S. government was alerted in advance to what last week's UNSCOM report would contain, As Clinton took Palestinian applause in Gaza last Monday, secret plans were underway for an air strike coinciding with the House impeachment vote. The president had time to consult with Congress and the U.N. Security Council but took no step that might stay his hand. As whenever a president pulls the trigger, Clinton's top national security advisers supported him. But majors and lieutenant colonels at the Pentagon, whose staff work undergirds any military intervention, are, in the words of a senior officer, 200 percent opposed. They disagree fundamentally. They know the attack on Iraq was planned long before Butler's report and consider it politically motivated

Meet The Press Transcript 12/21/98 ...MR. RUSSERT: When you say “ degraded,” what does that mean? He s— means he still has them, he still has biological and chemical weapons. SEC Y ALBRIGHT: Well, it s hard for us to say that everything is gone. But let me just go through some of the things that happened. There were 100 targets that were hit over four nights. There were 650 strike sorties, there were 400 cruise missiles delivered, and the destruction was heavy and devastating, as I said, to most of the targets that he holds the most dear, so that there were nine missile R& D facilities hit, 18 out of 19 of his weapons of mass destruction security aspects— that s the Republican Guard and his special concealment units— were destroyed. Twenty to twen— out of 21 command and control areas were damaged severely or destroyed and eight palaces. So when he claims he s victorious, that is sheer propaganda. MR. RUSSERT: But he has the capacity to rebuild very, very quickly. And if he, in fact, rebuilds all those sites, six months from now, up and running, what do we do? SEC Y ALBRIGHT: Well, we re back. And we have said very clearly that we reserve the right to use force again. And I think we ve proven our ability to deliver a very tough blow. MR. RUSSERT: The U.N. weapons inspectors were removed from Iraq. Saddam says they will never be allowed back in. That s real blow to us. SEC Y ALBRIGHT: Well, the truth, Tim, is that they have not been able to do their job effectively for the last eight months. They did a tremendous job before and, as we said many times, they were able to destroy more weapons than the Gulf War. But they have not been able to do their job effectively, and the truth is that if there is no way for the international community to monitor what he s doing through UNSCOM, then the sanctions will remain in place, and Saddam has to take some affirmative actions in order to let UNSCOM and the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, people back in.

Boston Globe 12/21/98 Fred Kaplan One question has emerged in the aftermath of President Clinton's four-day bombing campaign against Iraq: What was that all about? If his aim was to put a dent in Saddam Hussein's ability to produce chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, the dent was not a large one. If, as some of the air war's targets suggested, Clinton was trying to destabilize Hussein's regime, he did not hit its foundations hard enough. Speaking of the Pentagon's estimates of damage, John Pike, a specialist with the Federation of American Scientists, said Saturday night, ''It doesn't look like they did anything on what they said they were going to do, and not enough on what they were actually doing.'' According to the Pentagon's most recent figures, the attacks hit a total of 97 targets over the four days. The strikes damaged beyond repair only a few of the targets - the weapons sites, military headquarters, and industrial facilities that Pentagon planners thought had to be hit to accomplish the mission. ''I'm mystified why they stopped the campaign just as they had amassed sufficient force to complete the job,'' Pike added. More forces, including another aircraft-carrier battle-group and more than 70 additional combat planes, had just arrived Friday. ''You don't deploy 70 aircraft halfway around the world just so they can fly one combat sortie,'' Pike said. Iraq's nuclear and chemical materials were not attacked. Part of the reason might have been that nobody knew where these materials were. Andrew Cockburn, ... noted that the UN inspectors themselves ''couldn't find the stuff because Saddam kept moving it.'' So, Cockburn asked, ''If a bunch of people on the ground couldn't find it, how could some generals target it from the air?'' There are some well-known, immovable sites where chemical weapons could be built, but these are ''dual-use'' facilities - places with civilian functions as well, such as a chlorine plant vital to Baghdad's drinking water. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said the campaign was avoiding these targets so Iraqi people would not be hurt. The concern was laudable, but, given these limitations, it again raises the question: What did Clinton expect the bombing would accomplish? Cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs did strike some factories involved in producing missiles that could theoretically deliver chemical or nuclear weapons. The Pentagon said that 11 such targets were attacked. None were destroyed, one was damaged severely, five moderately, and four lightly. The damage to one target had not yet been assessed....General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Saturday that even these attacks had set back Iraq's ability to produce long-range missiles ''by at least a year.'' However, General Thomas Wilson, the Joint Staff's director of intelligence, said that even without the strikes, Iraq was a couple of years away from acquiring this ability....Missiles were also fired at facilities for the security forces that have guarded and hidden Hussein's weapons. These were the people who obstructed the UN inspectors. However, if the inspectors are no longer in Iraq - and it is doubtful that Hussein will let them back in soon - then their functions are no longer so vital. Furthermore, just because their facilities - barracks, headquarters, and so forth - were bombed does not mean the guards themselves were killed. Everyone agrees Hussein has become resourceful at moving his assets around on short notice. William M. Arkin, a military historian and former US Army intelligence officer, said of the strikes, ''I think we're hitting a lot of empty buildings.'' Strikes were also aimed at Hussein's command and control, TV and radio transmitters, Republican Guard facilities, private security forces - in other words, the apparatus that keeps him in power and maintains his links with the Iraqi army. These attacks, too, seemed fairly light. Of 20 command-control targets hit, seven were destroyed, four damaged severely, four moderately. Of nine Republican Guard targets hit, none were destroyed, three damaged severely, five moderately. Of 18 security targets hit, two were destroyed, five damaged severely, six moderately. Bombing rarely has much effect on these sorts of targets, no matter how heavy. During the 1991 Gulf war, American-led air forces mounted 500 strikes on command-control and 260 strikes on Iraq's leaders. Yet, ''despite the lethality and precision of the attacks,'' concluded the US Air Force's official five-volume ''Gulf War Air Power Survey,'' Hussein's ability to command his forces ''had not collapsed... The system turned out to be more redundant and more able to reconstitute itself.'' Perhaps Operation Desert Fox was called off for diplomatic reasons. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday night that he and Clinton ''always envisaged it would last four days ... because such a campaign is the right and proportionate response to Saddam's breach of UN obligations and also because of our sensitivity to the holy month of Ramadan.'' This claim is confusing, however, because the bombing continued into Ramadan, and it leaves unexplained the costly deployment of vast additional forces that did not arrive until the third and fourth days. In any event, yesterday morning, Hussein, who lived through it all once again, claimed victory - which, from his point of view, might outweigh Clinton's claim that the Iraqi leader stands ''degraded'' and ''diminished.''

[RaceBannon]

Wag the Dog Wiggles

Through the Timeline

December 22 1998 - January 14 1999

The Indian Express 12/22/98 TEHRAN: Another stray cruise missile from the U.S.-British strikes against Iraq has been found in Iran, a newspaper reported today. The missile landed in a barren area in the Southwestern border province of Khuzestan, the Jomhuri Islami newspaper reported. Iran, which condemned the four-night strikes that ended on Sunday, had strongly protested the accidental landing of another Iraq-bound missile on its territory last week, reports PTI

Reuters 12/22/98 China on Tuesday trumpeted its role in ending U.S. and British air strikes on Iraq and urged a return to negotiations with Baghdad aimed at resolving the U.N. arms inspection crisis. China made positive efforts in urging the U.S. and Britain to put an early end to the military action, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao. President Jiang Zemin delivered an oral message to President Bill Clinton and exchanged views over the telephone with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, elaborating on China's opposition to the use of force, Zhu said. He added that China opposed the use of force in international relations and called on the U.S. to seek a political solution to the crisis

Reuters 12/22/98 The United States is amenable to increasing the amount of oil Iraq can sell under the oil-for-food program, a U.S. official said Tuesday. Oil-for-food ... would be the one area where we could see perhaps the possibility of more forward movement, particularly if the humanitarian report indicated there was a greater need for food,'' Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering told a briefing on U.S. policy toward Iraq. Pickering noted that with the decline in the world price of oil, Iraq could not buy as much food at the same export level Freeper spartacus notes Let me see. We just bombed the hell out of them, (supposedly), now we agree to increase the amount of oil Saddam can sell

The Orange County Register 12/22/98 Alan W. Bock, Senior Editorial Writer One of the most over-the-top expressions of presidency worship came from retired New York Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore at a save-the-president rally in New York last week. I think of the millions of people who will suffer and die because the Republicans want to get President Clinton for a personal sin, said the apparently daft ecclesiastic a couple of days before the renowned peacemaker launched missiles

Reuters via Newsmax.com 12/22/98 Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov called yesterday for a strategic triangle with India and China, after Russia's bitter criticism of the four-day US and British blitz of Iraq. Primakov made clear that Russia would not back down from its condemnation of the strikes, and that it would also condemn any future offensive against Baghdad. ''We will never change our position. We are very negative about the use of force bypassing the Security Council,'' Primakov said in New Delhi. He said Russia, China and India should form a ''strategic triangle'' as a counterweight to US influence in the world. The decision by the United States and Britain to launch air raids without seeking approval from the UN Security Council infuriated Russia, which jealously guards its position as a permanent Security Council member.

Freeper Sandi 12/22/98 Center For Security Policy Decision Brief No.98-C 202 At present, it is unclear whether President Clinton's 'dog-wagging' bombing campaign against Iraq actually did degrade Iraq's weapon of mass destruction (WMD) programs. It certainly did not accomplish the systemic change -- the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime -- that would be necessary for any bomb-inflicted degradation to be more than a temporary setback for the Iraqi despot. What the seventy-hour air campaign did do, however, is: shatter the last vestiges of the Desert Storm-era coalition united in opposition to Saddam and end, apparently permanently, the on-the-ground inspections performed by the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM). As a result, it seems likely that the United Nations' mandated international sanctions regime -- a product of the former and renewed on the basis of unfavorable reports by the latter -- will not long survive.

The Village Voice 12/23-29/98 Jason Vest Was that a tomahawk missile in his pants or was Bill Clinton just happy to see Richard Butler's report? Even before the bombs actually rained down on Baghdad, cries of wag the dog went up from Capitol Hill to Dag Hammarskjö ld Plaza, and accusations characterizing the UNSCOM chairman as a geopolitical handmaiden to his beleaguered American patron began to fly like lethal airborne ordnance. Such speculation was hardly untoward: As former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter ably demonstrated earlier this year, Butler does seem to take the Clinton administration's input more seriously than that of his UN bosses. In another vein, it was on the same day Monica Lewinsky gave her grand jury testimony that Clinton commenced an utterly unnecessary bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan under the pretext of immediate clear and present danger. And, if we reach a little further into the recess of memory, we recall that it was on the eve of Gennifer Flowers's revelations in 1992 that then governor Clinton returned to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a retarded African American .It's always been hard to say what's more amazing about Clinton: his willingness to use his office for self-gain, or his ability to simultaneously co-opt Republican positions and get his fellow Democrats to abandon traditional principles in the name of defending his perpetually imperiled posterior. During the Judiciary Committee's proceedings, for example, New York's Jerrold Nadler held that LBJ should have been impeached for deceiving Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution rather than publicly pondering if a similar standard might apply to Clinton's attacks on Iraq and Sudan, Nadler, like so many other Democrats, rallied round the flagpole

AFP 12/25/98 Iraq wants Arab governments to take heed of demonstrations of support for Iraq which have taken place in their countries, the official INA news agency reported. The official Arab position should reflect the slogans chanted by Arab masses, INA said, in its report on the meeting. The participants expressed profound satisfaction at the position demonstrated by the masses against the agression - an allusion to four days of air strikes by US and British planes against Iraq last week. Also on Thursday, Iraq vowed never to allow the return of UN arms inspectors in the face of deep rifts at the UN Security Council over how to deal with Saddam Hussein....

Reuters 12/26/98 Iraq said its air defenses fired at Western planes attacking a post in southern Iraq Saturday, the Iraqi News Agency (INA) said. At 11:25 (0825 GMT) this morning formations of enemy planes...attacked one of our air defense positions which confronted them and forced them to drop their load indiscriminately,'' an Iraqi military spokesman, quoted by INA, said .The army said Thursday Western planes violated Iraq's southern airspace for a third straight day but did not report any exchange of fire. U.S., British and French planes, based in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, patrol a no-fly zone in southern Iraq to prevent Baghdad from threatening its Shi'ite Muslim population

AP Louis Meixler 12/26/98 Iraq will fire on warplanes patrolling the no-fly zones, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said Saturday. Speaking on Qatar's Al-Jazeera television, Ramadan was asked if Iraq would accept the overflights of U.S. and British aircraft that maintain no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. ``We say frankly now that any violation to Iraqi airspace will be met by Iraqi fire, Ramadan said. The interview was conducted in Baghdad hours after Iraq said its anti-aircraft gunners had driven off an attack by ``enemy warplanes that flew in from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia .. The Hartford Courant 12/27/98 Didn't the bombing hurt Mr. Hussein at all? He probably was strengthened more than hurt .Why did Mr. Clinton order an attack on the eve of the House debate on impeachment and end the bombing hours after he was impeached? He insists there is no connection, and he should be given the benefit of the doubt. Only a malevolent president would put American soldiers in harm's way for domestic political purposes ..

Creators Syndicate - www.creators.com 12/27/98 L. Brent Bozell III Bill Clinton's decision to unleash the dogs of war as he tip-toes on the precipice of impeachment conjures up a vision of White House defense lawyer Greg Craig appearing before Congress declaring: The President's military action was evasive, incomplete, misleading, even maddening - but it's not impeachable. There's no dodging the suspicion that Clinton is seeking to save his bacon by dropping some megatonnage on Saddam Hussein. After all, it's just what he did when he bombed Osama bin Laden's alleged facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan this summer. Both actions were launched with little or no consultation with Congress, and with too little consultation with the service chiefs at the Pentagon. Oh my, how the talking heads like Alan Dershowitz and NBC anchor-in-training Brian Williams are going nuts over that suggestion. How vile! How unpatriotic! What hypocrites. How about the Democrats? In 1983, Clinton defender John Conyers called for Reagan's impeachment for invading Grenada. (For good measure, he earlier called for impeachment over the Gipper's alleged incompetence in dealing with unemployment.) In 1984, as he ran for President, and again in 1986, Jesse Jackson suggested Reagan should be subject to an impeachment probe over U.S. actions in Nicaragua. Rep. Henry Gonzalez called for impeachment in 1983 over Grenada and again in 1987 over Iran-Contra. The National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union advocated impeaching Reagan in 1987. The major media didn't thump the tub for impeachment, but did suggest forcefully that Reagan's actions were even worse than the Watergate offenses that got Richard Nixon impeached. For example, in the January 9, 1984 New York Times, then-Senior Editor John B. Oakes proclaimed: President Reagan's consistent elevation of militarism over diplomacy creates a clear and present danger to the internal and external security of the United States. Presidents have been impeached for less. Oakes wasn't alone at the Times. On December 12, 1986, columnist Tom Wicker offered an echo: Mr. Reagan probably won't be impeached or forced to resign - though the offenses resulting from his policy, or his somnolence on the job, are more serious than any charge the House Judiciary Committee approved against Mr. Nixon. So where are these noble folks today? Have you noticed how the words War Powers Act haven't been invoked much by the liberal media in the last, oh, six years, now that a President they favor is lobbing the bombs? Where are the calls for impeachment from John Conyers and Jesse Jackson? Where are the charges of abuse of power from the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post? Nothing but silence. Stinking dead silence

ABCNEWS.com 12/29/98 Barbara Starr By attacking Iraq earlier this month, the U.S. military may have bombed its way into a shortage of the cruise missiles it uses to keep aircraft and their pilots out of harm s way. Pentagon planners, already dealing with tightening budgets, must now decide whether to spend the millions it takes to replace the crucial weapons, or wait for next-generation technology that may — or may not — be just over the horizon. U.S. B-52 bombers fired more than 90 cruise missiles into Iraq in the four days of Operation Desert Fox, using up some 40% of the most powerful missiles in the Air Force s inventory. But the air-launched weapons, made by Boeing, have been out of production for years, and there is no easy way to replace them. Not only does each missile cost $1 million, but to re-open production would be “ prohibitively expensive,” says Robert Wall, military editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology....The Air Force reports that prior to Operation Desert Fox it had 239 of the air-launched missiles, 198 of them able to carry the heaviest 3,000-pound warheads that were probably used in the campaign to blast through bunkers and other heavily fortified targets in Iraq. The weapons, known as Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles, or CALCMs, are to be replaced by the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missiles, or JASSMs, after the year 2001....But while the CALCM has a range of 600 miles, the JASSM s range may be less than half that, which will make it hard for the lumbering B-52s to fire without getting so close to their targets that they would be in danger. Military experts now have to make the tough choice of deciding whether to spend on weapons that may never be used, convert weapons that could deplete the nuclear inventory, or wait for weapons that might not be up to the task. They will also have to figure out how to pay for Desert Fox, which could easily approach $1 billion after all expenses including pilots, fuel and transportation are figured. Those calculations will, no doubt, form a significant role in calculating what weapons to buy for any future campaigns....Like the Air Force, the Navy must decide whether to replace the cruise missiles it used in Desert Fox or to wait for new ones. The Navy s problem, though, is less critical. During Operation Desert Fox, ships and submarines fired more than 300 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, or TLAMs, which cost $1 million each....

Sydney Morning Herald 12/29/98 HOWARD SCHNEIDER If there are any clues as to why Iraq fired on American warplanes in northern Iraq on Monday, they might be found in the comparative lack of resistance put up by the Iraqi military during four days of heavy bombardment last week. After restricting his forces to a largely ineffective effort to shoot down cruise missiles with anti-aircraft guns during Operation Desert Fox, President Saddam Hussein may now be trying to show Iraqis and the world that he can still mount a response - a demonstration at least partly demanded by Iraq's internal politics....Perhaps more importantly, he may also be starting to show how he plans to try to turn the United States-led air strikes to his advantage. Far from compromising, his plan may be to keep pushing his dispute with the Middle East and the world to its limits, expecting that at some point the cost of enforcing sanctions, no-fly zones and other restrictions will be seen as more trouble than they are worth.... At the same time, Saddam's Government has refused to allow the United Nations to resume the weapons inspections required before international sanctions against Iraq can be lifted. Iraqi officials have threatened to halt the UN program under which their country can sell its oil to pay for food and medicine, and have given conflicting signals about the fate of the hundreds of UN humanitarian workers there who not only oversee that program but direct education, health and nutrition projects.... Ultimately, Saddam's goal is to have the eight-year-old sanctions lifted. While there is substantial sympathy, particularly among Arab countries, for finding some way to relax the embargo - a sentiment heightened by last week's bombings - Monday's incident near Mosul seemed to have little or no connection to that goal. Rather, Mr Clawson suggested, his more immediate aim may be to eliminate the no-fly zones.... In countries like Egypt, Operation Desert Fox left many leaders calling for the US and Britain not to take matters into their own hands, but to follow whatever policy is set by the UN Security Council. Analysts suggested the attacks may also be partly meant to bolster Saddam's stature with the Iraqi military after a missile attack to which they were largely unable to respond. As the attack started, Baghdad newspapers took the unusual step of acknowledging that Iraq's inferior technology left its military vulnerable - a surprising admission in a country often adamant about insisting on the superiority of its culture to others.

Reuters 12/31/98 Sue Pleming U.S. and British planes returned safely to their bases Thursday after patrolling Iraq's no-fly zones, a Pentagon spokesman said, as the United States began to scale down its presence in the Gulf....Wednesday, U.S. planes attacked Iraqi targets for the second time this week after Baghdad fired missiles at British and U.S. aircraft monitoring the southern no-fly zone.There was a similar clash in the northern exclusion area Monday when U.S. warplanes from Incirlik attacked an Iraqi anti-aircraft site after it launched missiles at the jets. Despite the latest clashes with Iraqi forces, the United States began to scale down its presence in the Gulf. The Pentagon said the USS Enterprise battle group carrier was set to leave the Gulf region as planned by the end of this week. ``It is scheduled to rotate out of there as planned,'' said Sivigny, adding that there would be sufficient forces in the region to adequately fulfil their mission. Sivigny said there were currently 34 U.S. ships in the region, including 21 combatants and 13 support vessels. Another carrier, the USS Carl Vinson would remain in the Gulf region.The number of U.S. troops there would drop to about 22,000 from about 29,900 during the four-day bombardment of Iraq that ended on Dec. 20....Last week, Defense Secretary William Cohen, speaking aboard the USS Enterprise, said Washington was withdrawing many of its deadliest bombers and the Enterprise. However, Cohen stressed enough U.S. troops and equipment would remain in the region to be able to renew attacks if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein threatened U.S. allies in the region....Iraq said Thursday it would continue to attack coalition planes in the exclusion zones and insisted again its forces had shot down an American or British plane Wednesday.... The United States and Britain rejected the Iraqi claim that a Western plane was shot down and said all of their planes had returned safely to their bases Wednesday and there was no coalition damage or casualties....

Reuters 1/2/99 Iraq accused the United States Saturday of waging economic warfare against the Iraqi people by blocking the import of food, medicine and other vital goods. ``The U.S. Representative at Committee 661 is playing an aggressive role and continuing his economic war against the Iraqi people by deliberately impeding the arrival of food, medicine and other humanitarian needs in time to Iraq,'' the source added. The source said the U.S. representative on the committee had suspended 193 contracts up to the end of the year which Iraq had signed with other parties within the framework of its memorandum of understanding with the U.N. Iraq has repeatedly complained to the United Nations about delays in the arrival of humanitarian supplies. The source said the U.S. representative was also responsible for obstructing 133 spare parts contracts needed for Iraq's war-hit oil industry...

New York Post 1/4/99 Tom Topousiss Saddam Hussein is joining forces with Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden to launch a joint terror counterstrike against the United States and Britain, a new report says. An Arab intelligence expert, reported to know Saddam personally, told the magazine that very soon, you will be witnessing large-scale terrorist activity by the Iraqis. The source claims that the joint attacks would be aimed primarily at U.S. and British targets in the Islamic world. The contacts between Saddam and bin Laden have so far been limited to lower-level agents, according to U.S. intelligence sources cited by the magazine. An alliance would match Saddam's weapons - including easy-to-hide biological agents - and bin Laden's force of terror zealots.... In an interview with Newsweek at his desert camp in Afghanistan, bin Laden confirmed that civilian Americans are as much a target as the military or government agencies. Muslim scholars have issued [a religious order] against any American who pays taxes to his government, said bin Laden. He is our target, because he is helping the American war machine against the Muslim nation. Bin Laden has been waging a public-relations war, granting interviews to both Newsweek and Time magazines. Clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle at his side, bin Laden conceded to Time that he instigated the attack on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But he falls short of taking the blame. ...

Washington Times 1/4/99 Martin Sieff A rash of provocative actions by Saddam Hussein reflects a switch in tactics as he tries to break out of U.N. sanctions and smash the U.S.-led Middle East coalition against him, analysts say. And most doubt that current U.S. policies will be able to stop him. The coalition against Saddam is now in total disarray. Everything is in flux, said analyst Daniel Pipes, editor of the Middle East Quarterly. The system put in place eight years ago after the Gulf war to contain Saddam has collapsed. Our policy-makers really have no idea how to replace it. ...The Iraqi News Agency reported that Saddam told a Cabinet meeting the zones were flagrant and clear-cut violations of international laws, accords and norms, particularly the United Nations charter. ...Middle East diplomats and intelligence analysts said the air strikes appear to have inflicted some damage on Iraqi military sites, but there is no evidence they significantly loosened Saddam's hold on his country. The Clinton administration has failed to define a clear goal for its use of military force. As a result, there is no end in sight to these military strikes, said military analyst John Hillen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies....Privately, pro-Western Arab leaders of major nations such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt are believed to be urging more vigorous action by the U.S. government to topple Saddam....Experts say Saddam hopes his continuing defiance of the United States will revive his popularity in the Arab world, setting off violent anti-American demonstrations that will inhibit or weaken pro-U.S. regimes in the area.... Saddam has also been pushing for a pan-Arab summit where he hopes other Arab countries will condemn the U.S. and British air strikes and agree to disregard the U.N. embargo on Iraq.... Middle East intelligence sources said Israel takes seriously the possibility that Saddam may try to repeat his tactics during the early days of the 1991 Gulf war by trying to launch Scud missiles against the Jewish state, possibly during Ramadan.... There is also widespread uncertainty about how close Saddam may be to acquiring nuclear weapons. A study in the current issue of the journal Arms Control Today by David Albright and Khidhir Hamza of the Institute for Science and International Security concluded that if Iraq can obtain sufficient quantities of weapons-grade plutonium from Russia, Iraq could build its own nuclear weapon within as little as two months. Even if external sources of plutonium are not available, Iraq could still be in a position to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium of its own to make a nuclear weapon within two or three years, Mr. Albright and Mr. Hamza wrote.

Wall Street Journal 1/5/99 James Webb ...By fiscal year 2001 the Navy will have reduced the size of the fleet by 45% since my resignation as secretary of the Navy in 1988--if it meets its procurement goals. Since 1992 alone, the size of the fleet has declined by 31% while operational tempo has increased by 26%. More than half the ships in the Navy are at sea on any given day, and a majority of those are forward deployed. The aircraft mishap rate is nearly double last year's, the highest level in the past five years. Recruitment is dramatically off, 7,000 below requirements, the worst of all the services. Enlisted retention is below requirements and all officer warfare specialties foresee serious problems ahead. Funding for ship and aircraft modernization has declined by more than 50% since 1990. Departing servicemen increasingly cite their disappointment in the quality of leadership as their reason for leaving. Our effort to build a 600-ship Navy during the 1980s was a rather modest comeback from a period of serious neglect. Even before becoming secretary of the Navy I had argued that we should return to historical normality by reducing our ground and tactical aviation presence in Western Europe and increasing the size of the fleet. The morning I resigned as secretary rather than agree to a reduction in the fleet, I made a half-joking comment that I did not choose to be remembered as the father of the 350-ship navy. But never did I imagine that the Navy's leadership would allow the devastation that has now resulted in a 300-ship Navy, with the numbers continuing to sink.... But the time has come for the admirals to take the lead in educating Congress and the public regarding the strategic and operational requirements that drive the Navy's needs. Indeed, it is past time. They didn't fight for 600 ships. They didn't fight for 400. They have been telling their sailors that a 300-ship Navy is fine, while they may be on the way to 200...

Washington Times 1/6/99 Martin Sieff Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is orchestrating his latest confrontation with the United States during the holy month of Ramadan in the hope of unleashing mass popular protests against pro-American Arab governments. As a result, pro-Western Arab leaders such as Jordan's King Hussein, who visited the White House yesterday, find themselves whipsawed between the United States and Saddam. There is a method to this, said Daniel Pipes, editor of Middle East Quarterly. Saddam has found that Arab public opinion, the Middle East 'street,' is generally on his side, even though the governments are not. ... But the Middle East officials said the king remained concerned over what he saw as a lack of determined and coherent U.S. political and diplomatic policies to follow up the four nights of bombing of Iraq in December. Despite its close relations with Washington, Jordan is trying hard to remain on the good side of Saddam. On Monday, Iraq renewed an accord to supply Jordan with 4.8 million tons of oil products a year, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) announced.... But Saddam's dealings with King Hussein have so far been mild compared with the virulent propaganda war he has unleashed against the rulers of pro-American Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He called directly on the Arab masses to topple their rulers, who befriended the United States. The comments appeared aimed chiefly at Saudi Arabia and Egypt.... Like Nasser, Saddam hopes to use the force of popular opinion and even mob violence to intimidate pro-Western Arab governments and erode their support for U.S. policies, these analysts said.... In 1991, Saudi Arabia publicly allowed the United States and its allies to deploy more than half a million troops in its territory to carry out Operation Desert Storm, the liberation of Kuwait, Mr. Pipes said. But since then, the general drift of public opinion in the region has been steadily toward Saddam, and this concerted propaganda offensive is meant to intensify that process, he said. As part of his efforts, Saddam is pushing hard for a pan-Arab summit during or just after Ramadan to condemn the four nights of U.S.-British air strikes on Iraq Dec. 16 to 19. Ramadan ends this month....

Reuters (Yahoo) 1/6/99 Chief U.N. weapons inspectors Richard Butler flatly denied on Wednesday that the U.N. Special Commission in charge of disarming Iraq spied for any country. ``We have never conducted spying for anybody,'' he said in response to reports by two U.S. newspapers that U.N. arms inspectors helped collect eavesdropping intelligence used in American efforts to undermine the Iraqi regime. ``Have we facilitated spying? Are we spies? Absolutely not,'' Butler said. ``Don't believe everything that you read in print. There is much in those articles which is wrong. I regret it.'' AFP 1/7/99 The United States collected some military information on Iraq while participating in UN weapons inspections, a senior US official acknowledged Wednesday. The official, who asked not to be named, maintained that it was naive to believe that the United States, as a member of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), would ignore data collected by UN weapons inspectors. It is naive in the extreme to think that we can provide for seven years the knowledge, technology, expertise and people to help UNSCOM do its job and then create some artificial barrier so that people forget what they have seen or learned, he said

Chicago Sun-Times 1/7/99 Robert Novak Behind Tuesday's air-to-air confrontations between U.S. and Iraqi warplanes, loudly broadcast by Washington, is longtime daily violation of no-fly zones by Saddam Hussein's aircraft. So, American hawks as well as doves ask: Is this a phony, political war? As if Iraq's penetration of airspace forbidden since the 1991 Gulf War were novel, the Pentagon claimed the new incident showed that the Iraqi dictator was ``frustrated'' and ``desperate''--not just repeating a daily event. This chest-pounding by the Clinton administration reflects a desire to declare victory in the 70-hour bombardment of Iraq nearly three weeks ago. In fact, national security experts outside the government agree that Operation Desert Fox accomplished hardly anything. It neither weakened Hussein's hold on power nor moved toward a negotiated settlement with Baghdad. Yet Republican members of Congress, while intent on uncovering President Clinton's reprehensible personal behavior, seem oblivious to what he does about Iraq What is happening cannot be understood without appreciating what's been going on for some time. The underlying reason for Tuesday's first air-to-air engagement since late 1992--apparently resulting in no hits by either side--was that U.S. warplanes decided to challenge in the southern no-fly zone what it had been ignoring around the country. Especially in the northern no-fly zone, according to U.S. military sources, Iraqi violations are habitual. The typical pattern has been a two-hour patrol by American aircraft, followed by a two-hour break during which Iraqi planes enter the zone unimpeded, followed by another two-hour U.S. patrol. This pattern may have been broken by Washington in response to Desert Fox's barren outcome

The Pioneer 1/8/99 Reports that UN weapons inspectors helped Washington eavesdrop on Iraqi military intelligence call into question the credibility of the inspection regime and its claims that Iraq still harbours weapons of mass destruction, Baghdad's ambassador says. If true, the reports in the Washington Post and Boston Globe only strengthen Iraq's argument that sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 should be lifted, Nizar Hamdoon said on Wednesday. If this has been established now as a fact, then the whole issue of Iraq's compliance would have to be dealt with differently, Hamdoon said, calling the reports the nail in the coffin for the UN inspections programme. ...Russia, meanwhile, repeated its long-standing opposition to the no-fly zones in Iraq and its view that UNSCOM chief Richard Butler could not be trusted in the wake of the newspaper allegations about US-UNSCOM collusion. The Secretary-General has, however, been aware for some weeks that a number of journalists have been pursuing this story. When he first heard of these allegations, he asked Butler about them. Ambassador Butler categorically denied them, it said and denied that Annan was trying to pressure Butler to resign. State Department spokesman James Rubin said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright discussed the newspaper story with Annan early on Wednesday and the latter assured her that the views attributed to him in the Washington Post and other newspapers are not his, and that he does not believe there is evidence of this kind of misuse of UNSCOM .

Seattle Times 1/9/99 John Donnelly Knight Ridder Newspapers As the United States and Iraq continue skirmishing, the Clinton administration is preparing for an escalation that would involve an air attack against Iraq far more severe than the 70-hour Desert Fox operation in December, according to administration officials. Instead of pinpoint strikes, the administration is ready with sustained bombing that could last up to three weeks, said three officials with the State Department and the National Security Council, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Such an attack would begin if Iraq downed an American or British plane patrolling the `'no-fly zones in southern and northern Iraq. Other triggers would be if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein threatened the Kurdish minority in the north or Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the south, or if the administration learned the Iraqi leader was again preparing biological, chemical or ballistic weapons

The Electronic Telegraph 1/10/99 Scott Ritter THE United States, not Saddam Hussein, killed the credibility of Unscom. Washington destroyed an organisation whose reputation for technical excellence and an independent and objective character was crucial for its success....The final proof that the US subverted Unscom's operations came with last month's airstrikes against Iraq. The most important sites bombed during Operation Desert Fox were derived from data obtained from the work conducted by my team, both in terms of on-site inspection and special information collection techniques. The US violated its special relationship with Unscom. British intelligence officials, concerned at the damage the US tactics would do to Unscom's credibility, protested by withdrawing the team of British officers working on the inspection effort. ...The clear linkage between Unscom inspections and US (and United Kingdom) military action has not been missed by the Iraqis or their friends in the Security Council. I led over 30 inspections into Iraq. The key to our success was to pinpoint the locations where Saddam Hussein was hiding his weapons. Unscom sought out the assistance of the US and Britain, who agreed to participate in a special relationship to facilitate our disarmament efforts. Both governments agreed not to compromise Unscom. ...

Reuters 1/11/99 Ashraf Fouad Kuwait has placed part of its military on full combat alert in response to Iraqi ``threats'' to neighboring Gulf Arab states, a defense ministry spokesman said Monday. Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sheikh Salem Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah headed an emergency defense council meeting Sunday night to discuss ``threats by the Iraqi regime'' to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Colonel Ahmad al-Rahmani told Reuters. ``We have some units always on alert since the 1991 Gulf War and the latest measure is to further boost their readiness and level of alert,'' he added ..

FoxNewswire 1/11/99 U.S. fighter jets opened fire on an Iraqi missile site in the northern no-fly zone Monday, a U.S. defense spokeswoman said. She said the U.S. planes patrolling the no-fly zone had been targeted by the Iraqi site near Mosul, which had posed a threat to the allied planes. There was no damage to coalition aircraft and the planes returned safely to base in Incirlik, Turkey

MSNBC 1/12/99 Jim Miklaszewski American warplanes over Iraq on Tuesday won new freedom to strike at anything that might reasonably pose a threat to their safety, a significant escalation of their role in patrolling Iraq s “ no-fly zones,” U.S. officials told NBC News. Meanwhile, U.S. national security officials have been debating whether a second round of air strikes would be wise.... The new air combat policy enables U.S. warplanes to launch pre-emptive strikes against Iraqi surface-to-air missile sites along no-fly zones in both northern and southern Iraq. The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intent is to “ reduce the threat to American aircraft” enforcing U.N. resolutions that ban Iraq s air force from operating in those zones. The no-fly zones were established after the Gulf War in 1991 to protect Iraqi Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south. Both groups are regarded as opponents of President Saddam Hussein s regime. Discomfort with the daily showdowns in the no-fly zones has led to some dissent over what to do next. The widely held majority view, officials told NBC s Robert Windrem, is that the United States should not resume its broader air campaign against Iraq immediately. This view, which officials attribute to National Security Council staffers and others, holds that a new air campaign is not needed and could generate ill feelings since the Muslim holy month of Ramadan will only end at the weekend. It also holds that Saddam s relations with his Arab neighbors have been deteriorating and the United States should do nothing that could inadvertently halt that slide. Complicating the debate is a disagreement between the State Department and intelligence agencies over the level of internal dissent among the Iraqi military and security forces. The State Department tends to believe reports of executions among the Iraqi military. Many of the reports have been circulated by Iraqi opposition groups now on the receiving end of enormous U.S. financial resources.The CIA, according to interviews with officials there who requested anonymity, feels the regime is not crumbling and that reports that Saddam has been executing officers does not indicate a threat to the regime....

Reuters 1/12/99 Charles Aldinger Defense Secretary William Cohen said Tuesday that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was becoming more ''frantic and agitated,'' adding his voice to fears of a possible new Gulf crisis. Cohen, who is on a visit to Japan, vowed the United States would give no ground in enforcing no-fly zones over Iraq and warned Baghdad it would pay a price if it challenged U.S. and British air might

The National Post 1/12/99 David Frum by Freeper Capt. Canuck Remember Iraq? Largish country about halfway between here and China, sits atop a huge pool of oil, ruled by a megalomanical dictator who's trying to build an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons? If you do, you've got a much better memory than Bill Clinton, the U.S. president. Three weeks ago, the threat that Iraq might develop weapons of mass destruction was an urgent and imminent threat that had to be halted by a big American and British air raid. Three weeks later, after the Anglo-American warplanes smashed up a bunch of empty barracks buildings, warehouses and factories, Saddam Hussein is very nearly as close to his goal as ever. And yet, President Clinton seems strangely unconcerned

MiddleXpress AFP 1/13/99 Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is planning a great crime that could be even worse than his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, analysts in this jittery emirate warned on Wednesday. To prevent a catastrophe bigger than the 1990 invasion, we must be aware that we are racing against time, wrote columnist Sami al-Nassef in the newspaper Al-Anba. He said Saddam was preparing to commit a great crime and urged the government in Kuwait, which has been rattled by a verbal onslaught from Baghdad since the Desert Fox air war, to take precautionary measures.

Reuters 1/13/99 Freeper Buzzbrockway Iraq said Wednesday that its air defenses had hit a U.S. or British plane over the north of the country but did not say whether it had been destroyed .

January 14, 1999

UPI 1/14/99 U.S. officials tell UPI (Thursday) the Pentagon is drawing up plans for a major bombing campaign against Iraqi air defenses in the north, which have fired on American aircraft for three consecutive days. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the attacks could begin as soon as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ends this weekend.

UPI 1/14/99 The Iraqi leadership says (Thursday) Baghdad has fully complied with U.N. resolutions, including those requiring Iraq to scrap its weapons of mass destruction. A statement issued after President Saddam Hussein chaired a meeting of his top advisers demands lifting of U.N. sanctions against Baghdad and abolition of the ``no-fly zones'' in southern and northern Iraq.

AP 1/14/99 Iraq escalated tensions with Kuwait today, questioning the legitimacy of the emirate's borders and saying that parts of its land and coasts'' belong to Baghdad The harsh words from Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz appeared to be part of an ongoing series of verbal attacks against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which Baghdad blames for delaying an Arab League meeting on the Iraqi crisis. Iraq had hoped that during the meeting, now rescheduled for Jan. 24, it would be able to capitalize on popular protests in the Arab world in the aftermath of the Dec. 16-19 U.S.-British airstrikes against Iraq.... In his remarks in the newspaper, Aziz pointed out that Iraq accepted Kuwait's borders in 1994 as part of a U.N. resolution, but added that the resolution was tailored to expand Kuwait's coasts at the expense of Iraq.'' That resolution gave several miles of disputed Iraqi territory to Kuwait, including coastline and parts of the southern port of Um Qasr. Aziz said that Kuwait's acceptance of the arrangement means that it intentionally wants to inflict more harm on Iraq and the Iraqi people who at the end of the day are owners of the land and the coasts.'' Kuwait complained today to the Arab League about Aziz's comments, saying they are full of lies and deliberate fabrications of history.''... Meanwhile, Pentagon officials said two American warplanes fired missiles at Iraqi surface-to-air missile centers in two separate confrontations in the no-fly zone over northern Iraq today. It was the fourth day in a row that U.S. planes attacked Iraqi sites.

New York Times 1/14/99 Barbara Crossette UNITED NATIONS -- France, making a formal break with the United States and Britain, proposed on Wednesday that the Security Council lift the oil embargo on Iraq and institute a new weapons monitoring system to prevent Saddam Hussein from rearming. ...The United States rejected most major points in the French proposal in advance at a Council discussion last month on Iraq. Keeping Iraq under tight sanctions, including forbidding the country to sell oil freely to raise money for arms, has been central to American policy. ... But he reiterated the American position that sanctions could not be lifted until Iraqi arms programs had been rendered harmless. ... The initial reaction from Iraq, which would have to agree to a new monitoring system, was largely negative. Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said at a news conference such proposals, including similar ideas floated by Saudi Arabia, carry conditions that lead to exchanging eight-year-old sanctions with a new embargo. The French said in their plan that the oil embargo could no longer be defended, because it hurts the people of Iraq and keeps them hostages of their authorities. France would lift solely the oil embargo initially, leaving in place other sanctions like a ban on international air travel. Other sanctions would be removed only if the Iraqis demonstrate cooperation and compliance with new rules. Conversely, additional sanctions could be imposed should Iraq not comply with its undertakings and obligations. The French propose replacing the arms inspection commission with a renewed control commission that would have a preventive rather than investigative role, watching for signs of illegal arms use from existing stocks or attempts to buy or produce new prohibited weapons. Long-term monitoring would replace intrusive searches for evidence of past programs. ...Using language heard frequently from Iraq and Russia, the French proposal said that the control commission should have its independence insured and it professionalism strengthened. In the past those have been code words for shielding the inspections from American influence or pressure and putting them under the United Nations international Civil Service structure. ...Although offering no proposals on salvaging the arms inspection system carried out by the United Nations Special Commission, the American delegation is expected to oppose monitoring methods that do not allow intrusive inspections, even though the Clinton Administration did not press for them for much of last year. The French emphasize that their proposals are meant to generate debate and some action in the Security Council, which has been largely inert on the subject of Iraq since American and British bombing raids last month effectively killed the existing inspection system. ... In Paris the French Foreign Ministry said it was impossible to resurrect the Special Commission. France thinks that it is time for the U.N. Security Council to consider that no progress can be made by an illusory resumption of previous methods, a statement from the ministry said. The executive chairman of the commission, Richard Butler, continues to argue that the agency, known as Unscom, is not dead, and will have a new role to play in whatever system is ultimately devised. The Iraqis will have to accept any plan imposed on them, however. Hussein has always chafed at international controls, and the French proposal maintains some significant ones.

AP 01/14/99 CURT ANDERSON Forty-five minutes before the Senate impeachment trial resumed Thursday, two senators were discussing the case on live television. Although they were commanded to remain silent inside the chamber ``on pain of imprisonment,'' Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., were free to talk outside the Senate. After the session ended, many others did just that, and some didn't mince words about where they stand.

Reuters 12/26/98 Iraq said its air defenses fired at Western planes attacking a post in southern Iraq Saturday, the Iraqi News Agency (INA) said. At 11:25 (0825 GMT) this morning formations of enemy planes...attacked one of our air defense positions which confronted them and forced them to drop their load indiscriminately,'' an Iraqi military spokesman, quoted by INA, said .The army said Thursday Western planes violated Iraq's southern airspace for a third straight day but did not report any exchange of fire. U.S., British and French planes, based in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, patrol a no-fly zone in southern Iraq to prevent Baghdad from threatening its Shi'ite Muslim population

AP Louis Meixler 12/26/98 Iraq will fire on warplanes patrolling the no-fly zones, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said Saturday. Speaking on Qatar's Al-Jazeera television, Ramadan was asked if Iraq would accept the overflights of U.S. and British aircraft that maintain no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. ``We say frankly now that any violation to Iraqi airspace will be met by Iraqi fire, Ramadan said. The interview was conducted in Baghdad hours after Iraq said its anti-aircraft gunners had driven off an attack by ``enemy warplanes that flew in from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia .. The Hartford Courant 12/27/98 Didn't the bombing hurt Mr. Hussein at all? He probably was strengthened more than hurt .Why did Mr. Clinton order an attack on the eve of the House debate on impeachment and end the bombing hours after he was impeached? He insists there is no connection, and he should be given the benefit of the doubt. Only a malevolent president would put American soldiers in harm's way for domestic political purposes ..

Creators Syndicate - www.creators.com 12/27/98 L. Brent Bozell III Bill Clinton's decision to unleash the dogs of war as he tip-toes on the precipice of impeachment conjures up a vision of White House defense lawyer Greg Craig appearing before Congress declaring: The President's military action was evasive, incomplete, misleading, even maddening - but it's not impeachable. There's no dodging the suspicion that Clinton is seeking to save his bacon by dropping some megatonnage on Saddam Hussein. After all, it's just what he did when he bombed Osama bin Laden's alleged facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan this summer. Both actions were launched with little or no consultation with Congress, and with too little consultation with the service chiefs at the Pentagon. Oh my, how the talking heads like Alan Dershowitz and NBC anchor-in-training Brian Williams are going nuts over that suggestion. How vile! How unpatriotic! What hypocrites. How about the Democrats? In 1983, Clinton defender John Conyers called for Reagan's impeachment for invading Grenada. (For good measure, he earlier called for impeachment over the Gipper's alleged incompetence in dealing with unemployment.) In 1984, as he ran for President, and again in 1986, Jesse Jackson suggested Reagan should be subject to an impeachment probe over U.S. actions in Nicaragua. Rep. Henry Gonzalez called for impeachment in 1983 over Grenada and again in 1987 over Iran-Contra. The National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union advocated impeaching Reagan in 1987. The major media didn't thump the tub for impeachment, but did suggest forcefully that Reagan's actions were even worse than the Watergate offenses that got Richard Nixon impeached. For example, in the January 9, 1984 New York Times, then-Senior Editor John B. Oakes proclaimed: President Reagan's consistent elevation of militarism over diplomacy creates a clear and present danger to the internal and external security of the United States. Presidents have been impeached for less. Oakes wasn't alone at the Times. On December 12, 1986, columnist Tom Wicker offered an echo: Mr. Reagan probably won't be impeached or forced to resign - though the offenses resulting from his policy, or his somnolence on the job, are more serious than any charge the House Judiciary Committee approved against Mr. Nixon. So where are these noble folks today? Have you noticed how the words War Powers Act haven't been invoked much by the liberal media in the last, oh, six years, now that a President they favor is lobbing the bombs? Where are the calls for impeachment from John Conyers and Jesse Jackson? Where are the charges of abuse of power from the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post? Nothing but silence. Stinking dead silence

ABCNEWS.com 12/29/98 Barbara Starr By attacking Iraq earlier this month, the U.S. military may have bombed its way into a shortage of the cruise missiles it uses to keep aircraft and their pilots out of harm s way. Pentagon planners, already dealing with tightening budgets, must now decide whether to spend the millions it takes to replace the crucial weapons, or wait for next-generation technology that may — or may not — be just over the horizon. U.S. B-52 bombers fired more than 90 cruise missiles into Iraq in the four days of Operation Desert Fox, using up some 40% of the most powerful missiles in the Air Force s inventory. But the air-launched weapons, made by Boeing, have been out of production for years, and there is no easy way to replace them. Not only does each missile cost $1 million, but to re-open production would be “ prohibitively expensive,” says Robert Wall, military editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology....The Air Force reports that prior to Operation Desert Fox it had 239 of the air-launched missiles, 198 of them able to carry the heaviest 3,000-pound warheads that were probably used in the campaign to blast through bunkers and other heavily fortified targets in Iraq. The weapons, known as Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles, or CALCMs, are to be replaced by the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missiles, or JASSMs, after the year 2001....But while the CALCM has a range of 600 miles, the JASSM s range may be less than half that, which will make it hard for the lumbering B-52s to fire without getting so close to their targets that they would be in danger. Military experts now have to make the tough choice of deciding whether to spend on weapons that may never be used, convert weapons that could deplete the nuclear inventory, or wait for weapons that might not be up to the task. They will also have to figure out how to pay for Desert Fox, which could easily approach $1 billion after all expenses including pilots, fuel and transportation are figured. Those calculations will, no doubt, form a significant role in calculating what weapons to buy for any future campaigns....Like the Air Force, the Navy must decide whether to replace the cruise missiles it used in Desert Fox or to wait for new ones. The Navy s problem, though, is less critical. During Operation Desert Fox, ships and submarines fired more than 300 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, or TLAMs, which cost $1 million each....

Sydney Morning Herald 12/29/98 HOWARD SCHNEIDER If there are any clues as to why Iraq fired on American warplanes in northern Iraq on Monday, they might be found in the comparative lack of resistance put up by the Iraqi military during four days of heavy bombardment last week. After restricting his forces to a largely ineffective effort to shoot down cruise missiles with anti-aircraft guns during Operation Desert Fox, President Saddam Hussein may now be trying to show Iraqis and the world that he can still mount a response - a demonstration at least partly demanded by Iraq's internal politics....Perhaps more importantly, he may also be starting to show how he plans to try to turn the United States-led air strikes to his advantage. Far from compromising, his plan may be to keep pushing his dispute with the Middle East and the world to its limits, expecting that at some point the cost of enforcing sanctions, no-fly zones and other restrictions will be seen as more trouble than they are worth.... At the same time, Saddam's Government has refused to allow the United Nations to resume the weapons inspections required before international sanctions against Iraq can be lifted. Iraqi officials have threatened to halt the UN program under which their country can sell its oil to pay for food and medicine, and have given conflicting signals about the fate of the hundreds of UN humanitarian workers there who not only oversee that program but direct education, health and nutrition projects.... Ultimately, Saddam's goal is to have the eight-year-old sanctions lifted. While there is substantial sympathy, particularly among Arab countries, for finding some way to relax the embargo - a sentiment heightened by last week's bombings - Monday's incident near Mosul seemed to have little or no connection to that goal. Rather, Mr Clawson suggested, his more immediate aim may be to eliminate the no-fly zones.... In countries like Egypt, Operation Desert Fox left many leaders calling for the US and Britain not to take matters into their own hands, but to follow whatever policy is set by the UN Security Council. Analysts suggested the attacks may also be partly meant to bolster Saddam's stature with the Iraqi military after a missile attack to which they were largely unable to respond. As the attack started, Baghdad newspapers took the unusual step of acknowledging that Iraq's inferior technology left its military vulnerable - a surprising admission in a country often adamant about insisting on the superiority of its culture to others.

Reuters 12/31/98 Sue Pleming U.S. and British planes returned safely to their bases Thursday after patrolling Iraq's no-fly zones, a Pentagon spokesman said, as the United States began to scale down its presence in the Gulf....Wednesday, U.S. planes attacked Iraqi targets for the second time this week after Baghdad fired missiles at British and U.S. aircraft monitoring the southern no-fly zone.There was a similar clash in the northern exclusion area Monday when U.S. warplanes from Incirlik attacked an Iraqi anti-aircraft site after it launched missiles at the jets. Despite the latest clashes with Iraqi forces, the United States began to scale down its presence in the Gulf. The Pentagon said the USS Enterprise battle group carrier was set to leave the Gulf region as planned by the end of this week. ``It is scheduled to rotate out of there as planned,'' said Sivigny, adding that there would be sufficient forces in the region to adequately fulfil their mission. Sivigny said there were currently 34 U.S. ships in the region, including 21 combatants and 13 support vessels. Another carrier, the USS Carl Vinson would remain in the Gulf region.The number of U.S. troops there would drop to about 22,000 from about 29,900 during the four-day bombardment of Iraq that ended on Dec. 20....Last week, Defense Secretary William Cohen, speaking aboard the USS Enterprise, said Washington was withdrawing many of its deadliest bombers and the Enterprise. However, Cohen stressed enough U.S. troops and equipment would remain in the region to be able to renew attacks if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein threatened U.S. allies in the region....Iraq said Thursday it would continue to attack coalition planes in the exclusion zones and insisted again its forces had shot down an American or British plane Wednesday.... The United States and Britain rejected the Iraqi claim that a Western plane was shot down and said all of their planes had returned safely to their bases Wednesday and there was no coalition damage or casualties....

Reuters 1/2/99 Iraq accused the United States Saturday of waging economic warfare against the Iraqi people by blocking the import of food, medicine and other vital goods. ``The U.S. Representative at Committee 661 is playing an aggressive role and continuing his economic war against the Iraqi people by deliberately impeding the arrival of food, medicine and other humanitarian needs in time to Iraq,'' the source added. The source said the U.S. representative on the committee had suspended 193 contracts up to the end of the year which Iraq had signed with other parties within the framework of its memorandum of understanding with the U.N. Iraq has repeatedly complained to the United Nations about delays in the arrival of humanitarian supplies. The source said the U.S. representative was also responsible for obstructing 133 spare parts contracts needed for Iraq's war-hit oil industry...

New York Post 1/4/99 Tom Topousiss Saddam Hussein is joining forces with Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden to launch a joint terror counterstrike against the United States and Britain, a new report says. An Arab intelligence expert, reported to know Saddam personally, told the magazine that very soon, you will be witnessing large-scale terrorist activity by the Iraqis. The source claims that the joint attacks would be aimed primarily at U.S. and British targets in the Islamic world. The contacts between Saddam and bin Laden have so far been limited to lower-level agents, according to U.S. intelligence sources cited by the magazine. An alliance would match Saddam's weapons - including easy-to-hide biological agents - and bin Laden's force of terror zealots.... In an interview with Newsweek at his desert camp in Afghanistan, bin Laden confirmed that civilian Americans are as much a target as the military or government agencies. Muslim scholars have issued [a religious order] against any American who pays taxes to his government, said bin Laden. He is our target, because he is helping the American war machine against the Muslim nation. Bin Laden has been waging a public-relations war, granting interviews to both Newsweek and Time magazines. Clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle at his side, bin Laden conceded to Time that he instigated the attack on the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But he falls short of taking the blame. ...

Washington Times 1/4/99 Martin Sieff A rash of provocative actions by Saddam Hussein reflects a switch in tactics as he tries to break out of U.N. sanctions and smash the U.S.-led Middle East coalition against him, analysts say. And most doubt that current U.S. policies will be able to stop him. The coalition against Saddam is now in total disarray. Everything is in flux, said analyst Daniel Pipes, editor of the Middle East Quarterly. The system put in place eight years ago after the Gulf war to contain Saddam has collapsed. Our policy-makers really have no idea how to replace it. ...The Iraqi News Agency reported that Saddam told a Cabinet meeting the zones were flagrant and clear-cut violations of international laws, accords and norms, particularly the United Nations charter. ...Middle East diplomats and intelligence analysts said the air strikes appear to have inflicted some damage on Iraqi military sites, but there is no evidence they significantly loosened Saddam's hold on his country. The Clinton administration has failed to define a clear goal for its use of military force. As a result, there is no end in sight to these military strikes, said military analyst John Hillen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies....Privately, pro-Western Arab leaders of major nations such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt are believed to be urging more vigorous action by the U.S. government to topple Saddam....Experts say Saddam hopes his continuing defiance of the United States will revive his popularity in the Arab world, setting off violent anti-American demonstrations that will inhibit or weaken pro-U.S. regimes in the area.... Saddam has also been pushing for a pan-Arab summit where he hopes other Arab countries will condemn the U.S. and British air strikes and agree to disregard the U.N. embargo on Iraq.... Middle East intelligence sources said Israel takes seriously the possibility that Saddam may try to repeat his tactics during the early days of the 1991 Gulf war by trying to launch Scud missiles against the Jewish state, possibly during Ramadan.... There is also widespread uncertainty about how close Saddam may be to acquiring nuclear weapons. A study in the current issue of the journal Arms Control Today by David Albright and Khidhir Hamza of the Institute for Science and International Security concluded that if Iraq can obtain sufficient quantities of weapons-grade plutonium from Russia, Iraq could build its own nuclear weapon within as little as two months. Even if external sources of plutonium are not available, Iraq could still be in a position to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium of its own to make a nuclear weapon within two or three years, Mr. Albright and Mr. Hamza wrote.

Wall Street Journal 1/5/99 James Webb ...By fiscal year 2001 the Navy will have reduced the size of the fleet by 45% since my resignation as secretary of the Navy in 1988--if it meets its procurement goals. Since 1992 alone, the size of the fleet has declined by 31% while operational tempo has increased by 26%. More than half the ships in the Navy are at sea on any given day, and a majority of those are forward deployed. The aircraft mishap rate is nearly double last year's, the highest level in the past five years. Recruitment is dramatically off, 7,000 below requirements, the worst of all the services. Enlisted retention is below requirements and all officer warfare specialties foresee serious problems ahead. Funding for ship and aircraft modernization has declined by more than 50% since 1990. Departing servicemen increasingly cite their disappointment in the quality of leadership as their reason for leaving. Our effort to build a 600-ship Navy during the 1980s was a rather modest comeback from a period of serious neglect. Even before becoming secretary of the Navy I had argued that we should return to historical normality by reducing our ground and tactical aviation presence in Western Europe and increasing the size of the fleet. The morning I resigned as secretary rather than agree to a reduction in the fleet, I made a half-joking comment that I did not choose to be remembered as the father of the 350-ship navy. But never did I imagine that the Navy's leadership would allow the devastation that has now resulted in a 300-ship Navy, with the numbers continuing to sink.... But the time has come for the admirals to take the lead in educating Congress and the public regarding the strategic and operational requirements that drive the Navy's needs. Indeed, it is past time. They didn't fight for 600 ships. They didn't fight for 400. They have been telling their sailors that a 300-ship Navy is fine, while they may be on the way to 200...

Washington Times 1/6/99 Martin Sieff Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is orchestrating his latest confrontation with the United States during the holy month of Ramadan in the hope of unleashing mass popular protests against pro-American Arab governments. As a result, pro-Western Arab leaders such as Jordan's King Hussein, who visited the White House yesterday, find themselves whipsawed between the United States and Saddam. There is a method to this, said Daniel Pipes, editor of Middle East Quarterly. Saddam has found that Arab public opinion, the Middle East 'street,' is generally on his side, even though the governments are not. ... But the Middle East officials said the king remained concerned over what he saw as a lack of determined and coherent U.S. political and diplomatic policies to follow up the four nights of bombing of Iraq in December. Despite its close relations with Washington, Jordan is trying hard to remain on the good side of Saddam. On Monday, Iraq renewed an accord to supply Jordan with 4.8 million tons of oil products a year, the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) announced.... But Saddam's dealings with King Hussein have so far been mild compared with the virulent propaganda war he has unleashed against the rulers of pro-American Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He called directly on the Arab masses to topple their rulers, who befriended the United States. The comments appeared aimed chiefly at Saudi Arabia and Egypt.... Like Nasser, Saddam hopes to use the force of popular opinion and even mob violence to intimidate pro-Western Arab governments and erode their support for U.S. policies, these analysts said.... In 1991, Saudi Arabia publicly allowed the United States and its allies to deploy more than half a million troops in its territory to carry out Operation Desert Storm, the liberation of Kuwait, Mr. Pipes said. But since then, the general drift of public opinion in the region has been steadily toward Saddam, and this concerted propaganda offensive is meant to intensify that process, he said. As part of his efforts, Saddam is pushing hard for a pan-Arab summit during or just after Ramadan to condemn the four nights of U.S.-British air strikes on Iraq Dec. 16 to 19. Ramadan ends this month....

Reuters (Yahoo) 1/6/99 Chief U.N. weapons inspectors Richard Butler flatly denied on Wednesday that the U.N. Special Commission in charge of disarming Iraq spied for any country. ``We have never conducted spying for anybody,'' he said in response to reports by two U.S. newspapers that U.N. arms inspectors helped collect eavesdropping intelligence used in American efforts to undermine the Iraqi regime. ``Have we facilitated spying? Are we spies? Absolutely not,'' Butler said. ``Don't believe everything that you read in print. There is much in those articles which is wrong. I regret it.'' AFP 1/7/99 The United States collected some military information on Iraq while participating in UN weapons inspections, a senior US official acknowledged Wednesday. The official, who asked not to be named, maintained that it was naive to believe that the United States, as a member of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), would ignore data collected by UN weapons inspectors. It is naive in the extreme to think that we can provide for seven years the knowledge, technology, expertise and people to help UNSCOM do its job and then create some artificial barrier so that people forget what they have seen or learned, he said

Chicago Sun-Times 1/7/99 Robert Novak Behind Tuesday's air-to-air confrontations between U.S. and Iraqi warplanes, loudly broadcast by Washington, is longtime daily violation of no-fly zones by Saddam Hussein's aircraft. So, American hawks as well as doves ask: Is this a phony, political war? As if Iraq's penetration of airspace forbidden since the 1991 Gulf War were novel, the Pentagon claimed the new incident showed that the Iraqi dictator was ``frustrated'' and ``desperate''--not just repeating a daily event. This chest-pounding by the Clinton administration reflects a desire to declare victory in the 70-hour bombardment of Iraq nearly three weeks ago. In fact, national security experts outside the government agree that Operation Desert Fox accomplished hardly anything. It neither weakened Hussein's hold on power nor moved toward a negotiated settlement with Baghdad. Yet Republican members of Congress, while intent on uncovering President Clinton's reprehensible personal behavior, seem oblivious to what he does about Iraq What is happening cannot be understood without appreciating what's been going on for some time. The underlying reason for Tuesday's first air-to-air engagement since late 1992--apparently resulting in no hits by either side--was that U.S. warplanes decided to challenge in the southern no-fly zone what it had been ignoring around the country. Especially in the northern no-fly zone, according to U.S. military sources, Iraqi violations are habitual. The typical pattern has been a two-hour patrol by American aircraft, followed by a two-hour break during which Iraqi planes enter the zone unimpeded, followed by another two-hour U.S. patrol. This pattern may have been broken by Washington in response to Desert Fox's barren outcome

The Pioneer 1/8/99 Reports that UN weapons inspectors helped Washington eavesdrop on Iraqi military intelligence call into question the credibility of the inspection regime and its claims that Iraq still harbours weapons of mass destruction, Baghdad's ambassador says. If true, the reports in the Washington Post and Boston Globe only strengthen Iraq's argument that sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 should be lifted, Nizar Hamdoon said on Wednesday. If this has been established now as a fact, then the whole issue of Iraq's compliance would have to be dealt with differently, Hamdoon said, calling the reports the nail in the coffin for the UN inspections programme. ...Russia, meanwhile, repeated its long-standing opposition to the no-fly zones in Iraq and its view that UNSCOM chief Richard Butler could not be trusted in the wake of the newspaper allegations about US-UNSCOM collusion. The Secretary-General has, however, been aware for some weeks that a number of journalists have been pursuing this story. When he first heard of these allegations, he asked Butler about them. Ambassador Butler categorically denied them, it said and denied that Annan was trying to pressure Butler to resign. State Department spokesman James Rubin said Secretary of State Madeleine Albright discussed the newspaper story with Annan early on Wednesday and the latter assured her that the views attributed to him in the Washington Post and other newspapers are not his, and that he does not believe there is evidence of this kind of misuse of UNSCOM .

Seattle Times 1/9/99 John Donnelly Knight Ridder Newspapers As the United States and Iraq continue skirmishing, the Clinton administration is preparing for an escalation that would involve an air attack against Iraq far more severe than the 70-hour Desert Fox operation in December, according to administration officials. Instead of pinpoint strikes, the administration is ready with sustained bombing that could last up to three weeks, said three officials with the State Department and the National Security Council, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Such an attack would begin if Iraq downed an American or British plane patrolling the `'no-fly zones in southern and northern Iraq. Other triggers would be if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein threatened the Kurdish minority in the north or Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the south, or if the administration learned the Iraqi leader was again preparing biological, chemical or ballistic weapons

The Electronic Telegraph 1/10/99 Scott Ritter THE United States, not Saddam Hussein, killed the credibility of Unscom. Washington destroyed an organisation whose reputation for technical excellence and an independent and objective character was crucial for its success....The final proof that the US subverted Unscom's operations came with last month's airstrikes against Iraq. The most important sites bombed during Operation Desert Fox were derived from data obtained from the work conducted by my team, both in terms of on-site inspection and special information collection techniques. The US violated its special relationship with Unscom. British intelligence officials, concerned at the damage the US tactics would do to Unscom's credibility, protested by withdrawing the team of British officers working on the inspection effort. ...The clear linkage between Unscom inspections and US (and United Kingdom) military action has not been missed by the Iraqis or their friends in the Security Council. I led over 30 inspections into Iraq. The key to our success was to pinpoint the locations where Saddam Hussein was hiding his weapons. Unscom sought out the assistance of the US and Britain, who agreed to participate in a special relationship to facilitate our disarmament efforts. Both governments agreed not to compromise Unscom. ...

Reuters 1/11/99 Ashraf Fouad Kuwait has placed part of its military on full combat alert in response to Iraqi ``threats'' to neighboring Gulf Arab states, a defense ministry spokesman said Monday. Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sheikh Salem Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah headed an emergency defense council meeting Sunday night to discuss ``threats by the Iraqi regime'' to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Colonel Ahmad al-Rahmani told Reuters. ``We have some units always on alert since the 1991 Gulf War and the latest measure is to further boost their readiness and level of alert,'' he added ..

FoxNewswire 1/11/99 U.S. fighter jets opened fire on an Iraqi missile site in the northern no-fly zone Monday, a U.S. defense spokeswoman said. She said the U.S. planes patrolling the no-fly zone had been targeted by the Iraqi site near Mosul, which had posed a threat to the allied planes. There was no damage to coalition aircraft and the planes returned safely to base in Incirlik, Turkey

MSNBC 1/12/99 Jim Miklaszewski American warplanes over Iraq on Tuesday won new freedom to strike at anything that might reasonably pose a threat to their safety, a significant escalation of their role in patrolling Iraq s “ no-fly zones,” U.S. officials told NBC News. Meanwhile, U.S. national security officials have been debating whether a second round of air strikes would be wise.... The new air combat policy enables U.S. warplanes to launch pre-emptive strikes against Iraqi surface-to-air missile sites along no-fly zones in both northern and southern Iraq. The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intent is to “ reduce the threat to American aircraft” enforcing U.N. resolutions that ban Iraq s air force from operating in those zones. The no-fly zones were established after the Gulf War in 1991 to protect Iraqi Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south. Both groups are regarded as opponents of President Saddam Hussein s regime. Discomfort with the daily showdowns in the no-fly zones has led to some dissent over what to do next. The widely held majority view, officials told NBC s Robert Windrem, is that the United States should not resume its broader air campaign against Iraq immediately. This view, which officials attribute to National Security Council staffers and others, holds that a new air campaign is not needed and could generate ill feelings since the Muslim holy month of Ramadan will only end at the weekend. It also holds that Saddam s relations with his Arab neighbors have been deteriorating and the United States should do nothing that could inadvertently halt that slide. Complicating the debate is a disagreement between the State Department and intelligence agencies over the level of internal dissent among the Iraqi military and security forces. The State Department tends to believe reports of executions among the Iraqi military. Many of the reports have been circulated by Iraqi opposition groups now on the receiving end of enormous U.S. financial resources.The CIA, according to interviews with officials there who requested anonymity, feels the regime is not crumbling and that reports that Saddam has been executing officers does not indicate a threat to the regime....

Reuters 1/12/99 Charles Aldinger Defense Secretary William Cohen said Tuesday that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was becoming more ''frantic and agitated,'' adding his voice to fears of a possible new Gulf crisis. Cohen, who is on a visit to Japan, vowed the United States would give no ground in enforcing no-fly zones over Iraq and warned Baghdad it would pay a price if it challenged U.S. and British air might

The National Post 1/12/99 David Frum by Freeper Capt. Canuck Remember Iraq? Largish country about halfway between here and China, sits atop a huge pool of oil, ruled by a megalomanical dictator who's trying to build an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons? If you do, you've got a much better memory than Bill Clinton, the U.S. president. Three weeks ago, the threat that Iraq might develop weapons of mass destruction was an urgent and imminent threat that had to be halted by a big American and British air raid. Three weeks later, after the Anglo-American warplanes smashed up a bunch of empty barracks buildings, warehouses and factories, Saddam Hussein is very nearly as close to his goal as ever. And yet, President Clinton seems strangely unconcerned

MiddleXpress AFP 1/13/99 Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is planning a great crime that could be even worse than his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, analysts in this jittery emirate warned on Wednesday. To prevent a catastrophe bigger than the 1990 invasion, we must be aware that we are racing against time, wrote columnist Sami al-Nassef in the newspaper Al-Anba. He said Saddam was preparing to commit a great crime and urged the government in Kuwait, which has been rattled by a verbal onslaught from Baghdad since the Desert Fox air war, to take precautionary measures.

Reuters 1/13/99 Freeper Buzzbrockway Iraq said Wednesday that its air defenses had hit a U.S. or British plane over the north of the country but did not say whether it had been destroyed .

January 14, 1999

UPI 1/14/99 U.S. officials tell UPI (Thursday) the Pentagon is drawing up plans for a major bombing campaign against Iraqi air defenses in the north, which have fired on American aircraft for three consecutive days. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the attacks could begin as soon as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ends this weekend.

UPI 1/14/99 The Iraqi leadership says (Thursday) Baghdad has fully complied with U.N. resolutions, including those requiring Iraq to scrap its weapons of mass destruction. A statement issued after President Saddam Hussein chaired a meeting of his top advisers demands lifting of U.N. sanctions against Baghdad and abolition of the ``no-fly zones'' in southern and northern Iraq.

AP 1/14/99 Iraq escalated tensions with Kuwait today, questioning the legitimacy of the emirate's borders and saying that parts of its land and coasts'' belong to Baghdad The harsh words from Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz appeared to be part of an ongoing series of verbal attacks against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which Baghdad blames for delaying an Arab League meeting on the Iraqi crisis. Iraq had hoped that during the meeting, now rescheduled for Jan. 24, it would be able to capitalize on popular protests in the Arab world in the aftermath of the Dec. 16-19 U.S.-British airstrikes against Iraq.... In his remarks in the newspaper, Aziz pointed out that Iraq accepted Kuwait's borders in 1994 as part of a U.N. resolution, but added that the resolution was tailored to expand Kuwait's coasts at the expense of Iraq.'' That resolution gave several miles of disputed Iraqi territory to Kuwait, including coastline and parts of the southern port of Um Qasr. Aziz said that Kuwait's acceptance of the arrangement means that it intentionally wants to inflict more harm on Iraq and the Iraqi people who at the end of the day are owners of the land and the coasts.'' Kuwait complained today to the Arab League about Aziz's comments, saying they are full of lies and deliberate fabrications of history.''... Meanwhile, Pentagon officials said two American warplanes fired missiles at Iraqi surface-to-air missile centers in two separate confrontations in the no-fly zone over northern Iraq today. It was the fourth day in a row that U.S. planes attacked Iraqi sites.

New York Times 1/14/99 Barbara Crossette UNITED NATIONS -- France, making a formal break with the United States and Britain, proposed on Wednesday that the Security Council lift the oil embargo on Iraq and institute a new weapons monitoring system to prevent Saddam Hussein from rearming. ...The United States rejected most major points in the French proposal in advance at a Council discussion last month on Iraq. Keeping Iraq under tight sanctions, including forbidding the country to sell oil freely to raise money for arms, has been central to American policy. ... But he reiterated the American position that sanctions could not be lifted until Iraqi arms programs had been rendered harmless. ... The initial reaction from Iraq, which would have to agree to a new monitoring system, was largely negative. Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said at a news conference such proposals, including similar ideas floated by Saudi Arabia, carry conditions that lead to exchanging eight-year-old sanctions with a new embargo. The French said in their plan that the oil embargo could no longer be defended, because it hurts the people of Iraq and keeps them hostages of their authorities. France would lift solely the oil embargo initially, leaving in place other sanctions like a ban on international air travel. Other sanctions would be removed only if the Iraqis demonstrate cooperation and compliance with new rules. Conversely, additional sanctions could be imposed should Iraq not comply with its undertakings and obligations. The French propose replacing the arms inspection commission with a renewed control commission that would have a preventive rather than investigative role, watching for signs of illegal arms use from existing stocks or attempts to buy or produce new prohibited weapons. Long-term monitoring would replace intrusive searches for evidence of past programs. ...Using language heard frequently from Iraq and Russia, the French proposal said that the control commission should have its independence insured and it professionalism strengthened. In the past those have been code words for shielding the inspections from American influence or pressure and putting them under the United Nations international Civil Service structure. ...Although offering no proposals on salvaging the arms inspection system carried out by the United Nations Special Commission, the American delegation is expected to oppose monitoring methods that do not allow intrusive inspections, even though the Clinton Administration did not press for them for much of last year. The French emphasize that their proposals are meant to generate debate and some action in the Security Council, which has been largely inert on the subject of Iraq since American and British bombing raids last month effectively killed the existing inspection system. ... In Paris the French Foreign Ministry said it was impossible to resurrect the Special Commission. France thinks that it is time for the U.N. Security Council to consider that no progress can be made by an illusory resumption of previous methods, a statement from the ministry said. The executive chairman of the commission, Richard Butler, continues to argue that the agency, known as Unscom, is not dead, and will have a new role to play in whatever system is ultimately devised. The Iraqis will have to accept any plan imposed on them, however. Hussein has always chafed at international controls, and the French proposal maintains some significant ones.

AP 01/14/99 CURT ANDERSON Forty-five minutes before the Senate impeachment trial resumed Thursday, two senators were discussing the case on live television. Although they were commanded to remain silent inside the chamber ``on pain of imprisonment,'' Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., were free to talk outside the Senate. After the session ended, many others did just that, and some didn't mince words about where they stand.

[JoeSixPack1]

62 pages Race. Gimme a min to catch up. <|:-)~~

[ladyinred]

s are expected as no ground action is being considered. The outcome, of course, could be a bombing in America. The FBI is certain that Saddam was behind the World Trade Centre explosion in New York.

Interesting statement that I thought deserves a reprint!

This is terrific RaceBannon, and I am going to read it all when I can get enough time.

Thank you so much for doing this!!!

[ladyinred]

Ping

[nopardons]

Thanks for the ping...I'm going to have to read it all later,but what a treasure trove!

[G.Mason]

Good morning Race

Thank you for the ping.

Settling in for a nice long read.

[RaceBannon]

I am not the original compiler of this, all I did was copy it.

It was such a Find, and a FREEPER did it!

Not sure who, though, I used to know, but forgot.

[Grampa Dave]

I would love wrap a Nerf Bat with your time line to use on the No War for Oil liberals in my area.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for the ping.

I have pinged some of our indexers.

Great data here.

[Andonius_99]

Great read, Race...I think, heheh. I always love a good novel...;-) Bumpin' this for a later read.

[RaceBannon]

Novel...almost!

Does TOME sound more appropriate? I am not sure.. :)