Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said "everybody who has been involved with the issue of Iraq understands that a day of reckoning has been a long time coming for Saddam Hussein."
President Clinton ordered a "strong, sustained series of airstrikes" against Iraq on Wednesday in response to Saddam Hussein's continued defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors. U.S. and British forces unleashed a punishing volley of missiles. The attack, which the administration said would last up to four days, began less than 20 hours before the House was scheduled to open a formal impeachment proceeding against Clinton - the first against a president in 130 years. Republican leaders decided to temporarily postpone that debate. Clinton said in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office that the airstrikes were designed to diminish Iraq's ability to produce outlawed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons....
Democrats, who had urged a delay in the vote, leapt to the president's defense. "Saddam Hussein should make no mistake that despite domestic political differences in the United States, the American people and Congress stand firmly behind the defense of our nation's vital interests," Sen. Tom Daschle and Gephardt, the party's top leaders in Congress, said in a statement.