Facing Down A Despot?

Loading

Here’s a blast from the past.

1997 to be exact and the title of this article by Time magazine is “Facing Down A Despot”….referring to Clinton vs. Saddam of course. (h/t to long-time reader Carol)

My, what a difference a few years and a Republican in office makes huh? Below are some highlights:

Ever had a nightmare that you’re back in school taking the big exam? Bill Clinton is having one of those right now: he’s trying to pass a test in which every possible answer seems wrong. But the President’s bad dream is all too real. And it has a name: Saddam Hussein. When the Iraqi nemesis bared his fangs at Clinton and the U.N. last week–expelling American weapons inspectors from Iraq, threatening to shoot down U-2 surveillance planes and daring the world to do something about it–he precipitated the gravest international crisis of Clinton’s presidency. American and U.N. officials believe Saddam blocked the Special Commission inspection teams because they were closing in on his secret stores of biological weapons, some held by the elite Republican Guard. For example, Iraq reportedly has some 900 lbs. of the anthrax bacterium, a single gram of which can kill millions. Clinton’s mission is clear: get the inspectors back into Iraq. But no policy available to him–either diplomacy or war–can readily achieve that goal.

With the exception of Britain, America’s key Gulf War allies–notably France, Russia and Egypt–all oppose the use of force this time around. They urge Clinton to pursue an ill-defined diplomatic solution, ratcheting up the pressure until Saddam blinks. Clinton would love to prevail in that fashion, but he’s not holding his breath. He knows that Saddam responds to diplomatic wrist slaps the way a tank does to toy guns. The watered-down resolution passed last week by the U.N. Security Council, which hit Iraq with a ban on official travel, must be laughable to a dictator who rarely leaves his country.

If Clinton can’t persuade the Security Council to back the idea of military action, he may have to go it almost alone, with just a few allies–Britain, Kuwait, perhaps Saudi Arabia and Turkey–by his side. Aides say the President is comfortable with the idea. “He has understood for some time that we have to do the hard work of boxing [Saddam] in,” says spokesman Mike McCurry. “He is clearly prepared to do it.”

[…]Though caught off guard by the crisis, Clinton has been resolute in dealing with it. He kept his public comments pointed but brief while lining up unanimous support for the Security Council resolution condemning Iraq, then turned to the harder task of enlisting allied support for military action. The President has never been one to rush into major military engagements. He prefers to wait until opportunities present themselves. In Bosnia he agonized and delayed for years until the warring sides were exhausted, then bombed the Serbs to the peace table. But he knows there’s no time for that now. As he draws nearer to the brink, the President will have to do a better job of making his case to the American people and the world community. His strongest words last week came when he said he wanted to “wipe the prospect of chemical warfare off the face of the earth…I don’t want a bunch of terrorists with laboratories in their briefcases going from airport to airport wreaking havoc in the world.”

[…]Washington believes it has all the authority it needs to attack Iraq under existing U.N. resolutions. Security Council sources believe it is unlikely that Washington will go back to the Council for authorization since France and Russia would probably exercise their veto power.

[…]Saddam’s regime has so far managed to survive and even thrive despite all the American assaults. But Saddam’s people haven’t fared so well. They deserve to be pitied for the miseries he is ready to bring upon them again.

You get that? Clinton was prepared to “go it alone” against Saddam because he didn’t want to take the chance that he indeed did have WMD’s.

BUT…..6 years later, in a post 9/11 world, Bush was wrong to go into Iraq.

Didn’t matter that Saddam supported terrorism and had ties to Al-Qaeda (libs, check out the category to your right entitled Iraq/Al-Qaeda Connection before you go off half-cocked with your shrill cries). It doesn’t matter that he had thrown out inspectors time after time after time. It doesn’t matter that he disregarded 17 UN resolutions demanding that he abide by the ceasefire he signed. It doesn’t matter that in 2003, all of the worlds intelligence communities believed he had WMD’s. It doesn’t matter that he had used those WMD’s before.

None of that matters to the left. As the post below this one details, some of them believe the world would be better off if Saddam was still in power.

But in 1997 they felt a bit different.

The Vice President layed out the reasons why it was the right thing to do by taking out Saddam, and why we are all better off without him around anymore this morning:

MR. RUSSERT: And yet if you ask the American people, is the war in Iraq a part of the war on terror, this is what they now say: 46 yes, 53 percent, a majority, say it is not part of the war on terror.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I beg to differ. Let’s walk through it. Look at where we are in Iraq today. I do think we’ve made major progress. Five years ago, Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq. Iraq was a major state sponsor of terror. Saddam Hussein was providing payments, bonuses to the families of suicide bombers. He had a history of starting two wars, he had produced and used weapons of mass destruction. It was one of the worst regimes in modern times. We moved aggressively against Saddam Hussein.

Today, you’ve got Saddam in jail, where he’s being prosecuted for having butchered thousands of people; you’ve got a democratically elected government; there have been three nationwide elections; there has been a new constitution written; we’ve got almost 300,000 Iraqis now trained and equipped in the security forces. And we are–that’s significant progress by anybody’s standards. It’s still difficult, it’s still, obviously, major, major work to do ahead of us. But the fact is, the world is much better off today with Saddam Hussein out of power.

Think where we’d be if he was still there. He’d be sitting on top of a big pile of cash, because he’d have 65 and $70 oil; he would by now have taken down the sanctions because he had already, with the corrupted Oil for Food program, nearly destroyed them when he was still in power; he would be a major state sponsor of terror. We also would have a situation where he would have resumed his WMD programs. That was one of the conclusions of the Duelfer Report. So to suggest that somehow the world’s not better off by having Saddam in jail, I mean, is just dead wrong.

But seeing as how Clinton did nothing to rein in Saddam and force him to abide by the ceasefire for his whole Presidency it was left up to a man with the courage and fortitude to do the right thing, instead of the politically expedient thing.

In fact, Clinton did nothing to combat terrorism except fire a few missiles into an empty tent. He went into Somalia and then decided that wasn’t a good idea when a some soldiers got killed…so he ran. Showing to Osama’s the world over that we were a paper tiger under a Democrat. He treated terrorism as if it was a law enforcement issue. Hell, when the CIA was planning to capture Osama they worried more about the type of chair to put him into and the type of tape to put over his mouth so as not to hurt his beard then they did about actually capturing him: (via The New Editor)

O‘DONNELL: Let me ask you what you know about what we‘ve read recently about a secret military operation known as Able Danger. There are people involved in that that say that the United States knew about Mohammed Atta a year before the 9/11 attacks. Is that true? And was there a massive failure by our government?

SCHEUER: I don‘t know firsthand information about Able Danger, ma‘am, but from what I‘ve read in the media, that the lawyers prevented them from passing the information to the FBI, that certainly rings true. The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers.

When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community.

This is how Clinton “Faced Down” a despot.

He must of scared the bejesus out of them terrorists huh?


In fact, Clinton did nothing to combat terrorism except fire a few missiles into an empty tent. He went into Somalia and then decided that wasn’t a good idea when a some soldiers got killed…so he ran. Showing to Osama’s the world over that we were a paper tiger under a Democrat. He treated terrorism as if it was a law enforcement issue. Hell, when the CIA was planning to capture Osama they worried more about the type of chair to put him into and the type of tape to put over his mouth so as not to hurt his beard then they did about actually capturing him

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments