By John M. Broder and Barbara Crossette
New York Times
December 18, 1998
WASHINGTON -- Acting on early word from the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, President
Clinton set in motion Wednesday's military strikes a full two days before the inspector
formally declared to the Security Council that Saddam Hussein was once again in defiance of the
U.N. inspection program, officials said on Thursday. 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. Clinton was in Jerusalem on the first day of a whirlwind trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Butler's report was delivered formally to the U.N. Security Council and American officials as Clinton was flying home from the Middle East on Tuesday. About two hours into the 10-hour flight from Jerusalem to Washington, Clinton gave the order to U.S. forces to be prepared to strike within 24 hours.
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 December 1.
The timing of the strikes, coming on the eve of the impeachment vote, set off protests from Republicans, who charged on Wednesday that Clinton had orchestrated a crisis to slow the seemingly inexorable momentum toward impeachment.
Speaking to reporters at the United Nations on Thursday, Butler forcefully rejected suggestions from Republicans and others skeptical of the timing of the bombing campaign that he had tailored his report or the timing of its release to give Clinton a pretext to act.
"That is utterly wrong," Butler said. He said he had always planned to present his report to the Security Council on Monday or Tuesday, and he said that plan had not been changed by pressure from the United States.
"I want to say as simply and plainly as I can," Butler said. "That report was based on the experts of UNSCOM. It danced to no one's tune. It was not written for anyone's purposes, for the purposes of the United States, for example. It was my report, as promised, on time, based on the facts."
With Clinton in Israel through the weekend and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan beginning on Saturday, the window for American and British military action was very narrow, officials said.
The administration did not want to offend Arab allies, or put the president's safety in jeopardy, by ordering an attack on Iraq while Clinton was in Israel, a senior American official said Thursday.
Clinton did not make the final decision to undertake military action until after he had held a discussion aboard Air Force One with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a half-dozen members of Congress who traveled with them to the Middle East.
Albright informed the members of Congress of Butler's latest findings, saying the U.N. inspection group had presented a clear-cut case of Iraqi defiance. Clinton asked the lawmakers for their reactions. Although the question was not explicitly put to them, Clinton was clearly seeking to gauge the political impact of ordering American forces into action on the very eve of the scheduled impeachment vote in the House, one of the lawmakers present said.
"I said there could be no considerations other than the national security of the United States and the safety of our service personnel," said Rep. Sam Gejdensen, D-Conn., the ranking minority member of the House International Relations Committee.
Gejdensen said that one of the lawmakers told the president that there was a danger that Congress and the public would "misinterpret" a decision to take military action against Iraq as a means of diverting attention from Clinton's political peril. But the group concluded, and Clinton agreed, that that was a risk that had to be borne.
According to accounts from several participants in the decision making that led to Wednesday's strike, Butler had briefed American officials as early as last Friday on his most recent conclusions, which were consistent with weekly reports he had been filing to the U.N. for the past month.
Secretary of Defense William Cohen said the administration was prepared to act any time during the month of December, but chose to await Butler's most recent report before making the final decision to strike.
"We have always been prepared to go during the month of December, to take action," Cohen said. "We were not going to take any action until such time as a report was filed, we knew what was said, and the president actually called for a strike."
A diplomat involved in the U.N. deliberations said that there were no surprises in Butler's latest report, nor in the rapid American and British decision to launch air strikes. "We were conscious on Monday that we needed to be prepared for action when Mr. Butler's report came out," this diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
Clinton reconfirmed his decision to act at a meeting at the White House early Wednesday morning.
Military aides told the president that he had to make a firm go/no-go call no later than 8 a.m.
Conscious of the likely political fallout -- but unprepared for the harsh condemnation from Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott and other Republicans who questioned the president's motives -- Clinton
began working on the address to the nation that he delivered Wednesday evening.
At the end of the 15-minute speech, he made a brief reference to the impeachment debate raging in
Washington, but said that domestic politics would never weaken American resolve to act in its own
interests.
