Timing of December Air Strikes on Iraq Invites Debate On President Clinton’s Motives

By Kurt Holden

The British detention of former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet to face extradition to Spain on charges that he made Spanish citizens in Chile “disappear” forever, along with hundreds or perhaps thousands of Chileans, prompted a colleague of mine to ask happily: “I wonder who will be extradited next, Ariel Sharon or Henry Kissinger?”

It’s not certain that the British decision will hold, since the credentials of at least one member of the board that made it have been challenged. But so long as it does, probably neither “the butcher of Beirut” nor the “çminence grise” behind a number of questionable U.S. policies will be transiting Britain. Nor is Serbia’s father of “ethnic cleansing,” Slobodan Milosovic, likely to show up in Oslo to lobby for a Nobel peace prize.

Since his Dec. 16-19 attacks on Iraq with manned aircraft and cruise missiles, moreover, the Pinochet decision could conceivably put a crimp in U.S. President Bill Clinton’s travel plans after his retirement, which could come as early as 1999, or as late as the scheduled, mandatory end of his second term as president of the United States in January 2001.

President Bill Clinton’s Dec. 16-19 attacks on Iraq with manned aircraft and cruise missiles opened a debate in the U.S. and abroad over whether the timing of the Iraq strikes had more to do with the scheduled Dec. 17 beginning of impeachment hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives against the president than it did with possible weapons of mass destruction being concealed by Iraq.

Wrote conservative syndicated columnist Robert Novak, one of America’s best-known television talking heads, on Dec. 21: “Majors and lieutenant colonels at the Pentagon, whose staff work undergirds any military intervention...know the attack on Iraq was planned long before [Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Richard] Butler’s report and consider it politically motivated.”

Responding to criticism that he had timed the attack to head off an impeachment vote, Clinton said in a speech the day after the attacks were announced (and the impeachment hearings had been postponed for a day), “I don’t think any serious person would believe that any American president would do such a thing.” To back up this statement he noted that his secretary of defense, former Maine Republican Senator William S. Cohen, his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Henry H. Shelton all were willing to stake their reputations on the military necessity of attacking on the evening of the 16th, one day after UNSCOM director Richard Butler submitted his report, and three days before the anticipated beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The problem, as a number of conservative commentators including radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh pointed out, is that after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam, the same U.S. officials made the same disavowals about the timing of Aug. 19 U.S. retaliatory attacks with 75 cruise missiles on a guerrilla training camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum. Virtually all Americans now realize, however, that the Khartoum plant did nothing other than package medicines both for Sudan and for export, thus constituting an egregious case of mistaken identity based upon extremely suspect intelligence.

When Americans got around to asking, “why such haste?” many realized that the attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan less than 48 hours later diverted many of the headlines from Monica Lewinsky’s Aug. 17 testimony before a Washington, DC grand jury and Clinton’s televised confession that evening to “a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”

As the old adage goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Without entering into the question here of whether the attacks on Iraq do any good or what a sensible alternative U.S. policy might be (which has been the most widely asked question of Washington Middle East specialists so far in 1999), certainly postponing any attack on Iraq for at least 31 days until after Ramadan would not have exposed the U.S., Britain, Turkey, Iran, or even Kuwait to an Iraqi attack.

A Crucial Question

So was the decision to attack Iraq a military necessity, a futile attempt to head off certain impeachment of the president by the House of Representatives, an attempt to restore the “credibility” of the U.S. after so many military buildups in the Gulf followed by no military action—or all of the above? To aid readers in answering this question for themselves, here’s a five-week chronology of Clinton administration decisionmaking compiled by Washington Post writer Barton Gellman in his newspaper’s Dec. 20 edition.

Gellman says U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan learned on the evening of Nov. 14 that a U.S.-led attack on Iraq would begin at 11 a.m. (Washington time) the next day. Annan faxed Iraqi President Saddam Hussain to “strongly urge” he “resume immediate cooperation” with UNSCOM. Saddam Hussain signaled his willingness to give in and President Clinton called off the attack Nov. 15 after some of the aircraft were airborne.

U.S. officials allege, however, that Baghdad began balking at UNSCOM inspection requests almost immediately after Richard Butler and the inspectors returned. By contrast, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammad Saeed Sahhaf and Iraqi Ambassador to the U.N. Nizar Hamdoon both have claimed publicly that of more than 400 inspections initiated after UNSCOM’s return, problems arose with only five.

On Nov. 22, Clinton told reporters in Seoul that it “is important that we do not overreact here,” setting minds at ease. Perhaps that’s why no one seemed to notice that on Dec. 10 the Pentagon shipped three Patriot anti-missile batteries of three missile launchers each to Israel, a sure harbinger of what was to come.

Two days later, on Sunday, Dec. 12 (the second day of Clinton’s visit to Gaza, the West Bank and Israel), four top presidential advisers, Albright, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Martin Indyk, Berger and White House adviser for Near East affairs Bruce Riedel met in the new Hilton Hotel in Jerusalem. Patched into the meeting via a secure video link from Washington were Berger deputy James Steinberg, top vice presidential adviser Leon Furth, Defense Secretary Cohen, General Shelton, CIA Director George J. Tenet and White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.

Berger and Albright proceeded from the meeting to Clinton’s suite to ask if he would authorize Cohen to “prepare to execute” the order for an attack three days later on Wednesday afternoon. Clinton, according to Berger, said, “Go ahead and let’s get ready.”

Gellman quotes Berger as saying that during the first two hours of the flight back to the U.S. on Air Force One on Tuesday, Dec. 15, he had before him the final language of the report that Richard Butler was working on of Iraqi compliance, or lack of it, due to be finished Tuesday night. Presumably it had not yet been presented either to Kofi Annan or the U.N. Security Council. On Dec. 23, when asked by the executive editor of the Washington Report about this sequence, which seems to confirm accusations that Butler was working with the U.S. administration rather than his U.N. superiors, Berger said he was not sure when the final text came into his possession.

Clinton directed Cohen to sign the “execute order” at 7:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) Wednesday, Dec. 16 (the same day that all U.S. major dailies headlined for the first time that Clinton was sure to be impeached when hearings began the next day). At 2 p.m. Berger informed Clinton it was “the last moment at which you can turn this off” and, according to Berger, Clinton said “Let’s go forward.”

The first Tomahawk missile was fired at 3:08 p.m. EST Wednesday (11:08 p.m. Iraq time). A few minutes before 5 p.m. EST members of the U.N. Security Council were listening to Butler explain why he thought Iraq had violated the Security Council demands when news came, via CNN, that air raid sirens were sounding in Baghdad. When the first missiles were scheduled to hit their targets at 5:05 p.m. EST, Berger ordered the first U.S. announcement of the attack.

Kofi Annan openly expressed despair. Later, controversial UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter, who had resigned earlier after being accused of maintaining close ties to Israel and who in turn accused Madeleine Albright and Clinton administration officials of holding back UNSCOM to avoid further confrontations with Iraq, charged that Butler had been working in coordination with the Clinton administration and that from the time he returned to Baghdad in November, Butler had set out to build a case against Iraq.

Among the five instances which UNSCOM inspectors protested, according to the Iraqis, was being barred from a surprise visit to the camp of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, an Iranian opposition group based in Iraq which has been shelled, bombed from the air and car bombed by Iranian government agents; being turned away from another installation because it was closed on Fridays; being denied permission to talk to Iraqi university undergraduate science students about their research projects; and being barred from sending more than four inspectors into the headquarters of the ruling Ba’ath party.

On the night the attack began, bewildered Iraqi ambassador to the U.N. Hamdoon pulled aside a Western diplomat and asked, “What is it we are supposed to do? Who do we talk to?” according to witnesses.

Whatever the motivation for the attack, two things are likely to be clear to historians. Saddam Hussain, who is at least partly responsible for the waste of the human and material resources of both Iraq and Iran in their bloody, eight-year war from 1980 to 1988, and who then wasted more lives and perhaps $600 billion in Arab resources rather than submit his dispute with Kuwait to mediation or arbitration, likely will be described by historians as the worst thing to happen to the Middle East since the Mongol invasions. As for the American missile strikes in August against Afghanistan and Sudan, and in December against Iraq, they may become known as “Monica’s War,” forever coupled with accounts of an American president’s personal scandals.

Kurt Holden is a free-lance writer who divides his time between the U.S. and the Middle East.