Tag: Bill Clinton

21 January 1998

Posted on by Featherproof Books

The Monica Lewinsky affair becomes public when several news media organizations report on a sexual relationship between Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton. The Washington Post reports the existence of taped recordings of the two. The president tells PBS’s Jim Lehr that “there is no improper relationship.”

January 21 is the beginning of a sleazy tale of late-night phone calls, clandestine meetings in the Oval Office, recorded phone calls, a blue dress, a cigar, and a story that would become known as “Monica-gate.” The year-long public scandal and impeachment of Clinton is said to have never diverted his attention from national security matters.

18 January 1993

Posted on by Featherproof Books
Piece of a Tomahawk missle that was launched by the U.S. against Iraq

 

Just days before Bill Clinton takes office as president, 46 Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles are used to attack supposed WMD-related buildings around Baghdad after Iraq refuses to cooperate with U.N. inspectors.

One missile reportedly veers off course and hits the Al-Rasheed Hotel, the main hotel used by diplomats and VIP visitors to the country, killing two, according to Iraqi officials. A mosaic depicting President George H.W. Bush is installed at the entrance the lobby, forcing visitors to walk over his face to enter the hotel.

It’s funny that George Bush the son would later come into office with a bad taste in his mouth about the promiscuous use of cruise missiles by Clinton, that such attacks were just “swatting at flies” and “pounding sand,” even though his father was the originator of a tactic that now—with drones and hyper-accurate weapons and perpetual war placing U.S. aircraft globally—seems so obsolete.

By the way, I visited the “Museum of the Aggression” in Baghdad just weeks later, where parts of the Tomahawk missiles used in the attack were on display. The most intriguing was the “brain” of the missile seeker, with Texas Instruments circuitry visible. I “obtained” the piece and later showed it during a talk I gave at the Naval War College. Naval Investigative Service agents then arrived at my office in Washington demanding that I give the part back. I declined to turn it over and told them that they should be glad that I had it and not the Russians. It all seems so long ago.

7 January 1995

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The “Bojinka” set of plots in the Philippines are foiled, both an attack on the Pope and an assassination attempt against President Clinton, as well as preparations that involved airliners.

In the discovery of the plot, Philippine police discover Ramzi Yousef’s bomb-making lab and they arrest an accomplice, Abdul Hakim Murad, who is subsequently tortured by the Philippine authorities before being hand over to the FBI.

Captured materials revealed a plot to kill the Pope, to blow up U.S. and Israeli embassies in Manila, to destroy United Airlines aircraft flying Asian routes, and even to crash a plane into CIA HQ (surely the most obvious connection to 9/11). Murad also tells Philippine authorities details about Ramzi Yousef’s involvement in February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and that he planted a bomb on a Philippines airliner in December 1994 that killed one and almost brought the airliner down.

6 January 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

National Security Advisor “Sandy” Berger says President Clinton has expanded the rules of engagement (ROEs) for the no-fly zones over Iraq, allowing preemptive strikes on air defense and command and control targets that had previously exhibited hostile action against American overflights (on earlier flights, thus stretching the concept of “self defense”).

The no-fly zones, which had been imposed in 1991 after the first Gulf War, restricted Iraqi fighter jet (and later, attack helicopter) activity, essentially immobilizing (and deteriorating) the Iraqi air force. The scope of the no-fly zones would be expanded on numerous occasions and would even include “no-drive zones” in southern and northern Iraq that restricted offensive military action with armored vehicles.

The January 1999 expansion, compensating for the absence of on-the-ground UN inspectors and responding to increased Iraqi challenges to U.S. (and allied) overflights, really constitutes the beginning of the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war and the beginning of the end for Iraq. By March 2003, when the second Gulf War began, a clandestine operation called Operation Southern Focus built on the expanded 1999 ROEs and was weeks in the making, bombing Iraq and destroying Iraq’s command, communications, early warning and air defense capabilities while America was debating whether even to go to war. Southern Focus ultimately facilitated the invasion and the rapid defeat.

28 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

President Bill Clinton announces that he will not travel to North Korea before the end of his term, citing “insufficient time to complete the work at hand.”

White House national security adviser Sandy Berger and other White House officials were hesitant to have the president leave the country during the ongoing election dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Berger called it a “potential Constitutional crisis.”

Whether Clinton’s trip to North Korea would have achieved anything anyhow is questionable, but the precedent had also been set for an outgoing president not to leave new and pressing national security business for their successors. Hence the real reason behind not “retaliating” for the October attack in Yemen on the USS Cole: that the reverberations might have locked the new administration into some specific action.

17 December 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
Al Kut Barracks West - Northwest Iraq

 

U.N. weapons inspectors evacuate Iraq for the last time, removing with them a secret NSA telephone monitoring device that American agents had brought in under United Nations cover.

After weeks of disputes and obstructions by the Iraqis—stopping or interfering with inspections of “presidential sites” and other sensitive installations associated with Saddam Hussein’s protect—UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler decides to withdraw all U.N. staff, setting the stage for American airstrikes.

President Clinton then signs the orders for Operation Desert Fox, and airstrikes against Iraqi targets begin just before 1 AM (2200 GMT on December 16). Desert Fox is aimed officially, according to the White House, against Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that his country had also been left with “no option” but to mount the strikes. Russia and China condemn the actions and Russia recalls its ambassador from Washington. The next day, Russia recalls its ambassador to London.

Secretary Albright holds a briefing on Desert Fox and was asked how she would respond to those who say that, unlike the 1991 Gulf War, this campaign “looks like mostly an Anglo-American mission.” She answers: “We are now dealing with a threat, I think, that is probably harder for some to understand because it is a threat of the future, rather than a present threat, or a present act such as a border crossing, a border aggression. And here, as the president described in his statement yesterday, we are concerned about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s ability to have, develop, deploy weapons of mass destruction and the threat that that poses to the neighbors, to the stability of the Middle East, and therefore, ultimately to ourselves.”

There are, of course, no real nuclear, chemical and biological weapons left, but then the actual targets of Desert Fox strikes are security-related facilities associated with Saddam’s presidential guards—with the hope that their destruction might provoke a coup or uprising. Inspectors don’t return to Iraq until 2003, in an eleventh hour effort to stave off the second Gulf War.

3 December 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
President Bill Clinton speaks to US troops

 

At the end of a five-day European tour, President Bill Clinton gives the order for the first group of American soldiers to go to Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia. About 700 soldiers are slated to deploy as part of an international peacekeeping force.

“I have authorized the secretary of defense to order the deployment of the preliminary troops … to Bosnia as I said I would as soon I was convinced that the military plan is appropriate,” Clinton said.

The remaining 20,000 U.S. forces are to be sent after the planned signing of the Bosnian peace treaty on December 14. In total, 25 countries are slated to send peacekeepers.

“Our destiny in America is still linked to Europe,” Clinton said, sort of sad commentary on an America or two geographic realities—the European domination and the challenges everywhere else in the world. The CIA is already engaged in covert operations against al Qaeda (and the next day George Tenet would declare war) but the Middle East—outside of dealing with rogues Iraq and Iran and protecting Israel—barely gets a strategic consideration. Is American destiny linked to Europe? It is a question we could still debate today.

27 November 1993

Posted on by William Arkin
Haynes R. Mahoney

 

An American diplomat, on his way to a Thanksgiving reception, is kidnapped in Yemen, the first known kidnapping of a diplomat in Yemen. Reporting on the kidnapping describes “the country south of Saudi Arabia” as “faction ridden” and ascribed the hostage taking to “a squabble between competing factions.” The press reported that “conservative” North Yemen and formerly Marxist South Yemen united to create the latest version of the country. Interior ministry officials said the diplomat—Haynes R. Mahoney—had been taken to Marib, which the news media described as “oil rich,” its only seeming geopolitical frame of reference.

“There has been little activity in Yemen by radical Muslim fundamentalist groups that might strike at American targets in response to President Clinton’s meeting on Wednesday with the novelist Salman Rushdie,” the New York Times said, the narcissistic frame of reference virtually oblivious to the emergence of radical Islam.

24 November 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
Martin Indyk

 

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Martin Indyk wraps up meetings with 16 Iraqi opposition groups in London. The meetings, arranged by the British Foreign Office, seeks to unite the expatriate groups as a viable alternative to Saddam Hussein. The groups pledge to work to indict the Iraqi president for war crimes as one means of uniting Iraqi public opinion against him.

“We are not talking here about the opposition groups being involved in activities that are designed to overthrow violently the regime in Baghdad. We are talking about the opposition groups developing political support for a new Iraq, a new open, democratic Iraq,” the Foreign Office junior minister said.

By late 1998, with much of the White House’s (and the CIA’s) attention shifted to al Qaeda, Iraq had fallen off the radar screen, and with an end to U.N. inspections, there was little new reliable intelligence coming from inside the country. But Congress passed a law allowing President Clinton to spend 93 million dollars helping anti-Saddam groups and the beginning of the end was afoot, particularly in providing an outsize role to the Iraqi exiles, who later would manipulate both the Clinton and Bush administrations with fake intelligence and false promises of support inside the country. Indyk would go on to become ambassador to Israel (1999–2001), a position he also filled from 1995–1997.

15 November 1997

Posted on by William Arkin

 

In a speech in Sacramento, California, President Bill Clinton portrays a bleak future if nations do not cooperate against “organized forces of destruction,” telling the audience that only a small amount of “nuclear cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did.” Stopping the spread of nuclear materials and not letting weapons “fall into the wrong hands” is “fundamentally what is stake in the stand-off we’re having in Iraq today,” he says.

Clinton asked Americans not to view the current crisis as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, “think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.”

It is a good reminder that the WMD phantom—with Iraq, North Korea, Iran, etc.—is perpetual and also, short of destroying Iraq and war, we are so unable to peacefully resolve the bigger question of proliferation in the most difficult cases.