UNSCOM's Scum of the Earth

...They held the teams at bay for several hours before allowing them to enter a site, enough time for the regime to spirit out whatever it was UNSCOM was not supposed to see...

...This incident, on top of the administration's established weakness on Iraq, may well have influenced Baghdad to think it had room to maneuver...

...The crisis had already begun, just as Albright spoke so optimistically and unrealistically about the achievements of Clinton's Iraqi policy...

...During the early eighties, Iraq's diplomats actively cultivated American "opinion leaders," including the authors of this article, for support in its bitter war with Iran...

...Although he quickly backed off, the early Clinton administration kept insisting that it wanted to "depersonalize" the conflict...

...Shortly after Kamil arrived in Amman, the Iraqi government invited UNSCOM chairman Ekeus to Baghdad...

...On October 21, 1996, Clinton attended a fundraiser in Detroit sponsored by prominent local businessman Samir Danou...

...It now looks as if the U.S...

...Current nightmares over the spread of weapons of mass destruction can be seen as a consequence of Western inattention to this war, which lasted longer than either of the World Wars and reintroduced such horrors as poison gas attacks on both military and civilian targets...

...But the most crucial factor had to be long that the Clinton administration failed to grasp just how deadly a threat Sad-dam continued to be and failed to provide UNSCOM the support necessary to deal with it...

...members of UNSCOM, which also withdrew almost all the rest of its staff from Iraq...

...The alleged plot would have shipped them to Iraq with false papers via a Philippines front company for $12.5 million...

...Naval War College staged war games featuring an Iraqi attack on U.S...

...Danou made a second call to TAS specifically to deny that he had been in contact with Baghdad about his money-raising for Clinton, but it would not have taken much intelligence effort for news of the fundraiser to reach Saddam Hussein...

...Secretary of State Albright cut short her tour of India to answer the Russian foreign minister's summons to a 2 a.m...

...Customs agents in West Palm Beach, Florida, announced the arrest of two former U.S...

...split openly over the work of UNSCOM, as Russia pressed for a quicker end to controls and more limits on UNSCOM's executive chairman...

...the problem was that he had managed tokeep much of It substantially intact and Clinton haddone nothing about it...

...Unlike most chemical agents, which dissipate quickly and for which a gas mask is adequate protection, VX is viscous, sticky, and persistent...

...The Clinton administration caved on a crucial point of principle, and, worse, lied about it afterward...

...Secretary General Kofi Annan...

...sanctions on Iraq...

...One influential columnist also took alarm, and the administration response was to complain to UNSCOM about the bad publicity...

...This was essentially to maintain sanctions on Iraq to keep the regime weak enough to be overthrown with covert U.S...

...He and his group were returning to the airport when their motorcade was suddenly diverted to a chicken farm owned by Hussein Kamil...

...Iraq is also known to have imported 75o tons of VX chemical precursors...

...President Clinton, the ultimate Commander in Chief, has been glad to claim a hollow victory and rush off to tend to the Asian economies...

...Already in December 1995, a foreign policy specialist was stunned to hear a National Security Council official close a discussion of Saddam's terror weapons with the words, "Would you like to tell the president in an election year that we may have more of a problem with Saddam than we thought...

...The White House tried to spin the token missile strikes as yet another victory over Saddam, but even its own officials couldn't swallow that one...

...Since he was flagrantly continuing his forbidden programs, it was possible he did so because he saw the unconventional agents as an option to use, if and when he got fed up with sanctions...

...No reasonable person credits Baghdad's claim to have destroyed this stock unilaterally...

...One disappointed official referred sardonically to the president's then national security adviser as "Tony Lake of the sweaty palms...

...That exercise also simulated a terrorist biological attack on a Saudi city...

...The issue is Saddam Hussein's continuing possession and possible production of the most deadly substances known to...

...Yet Clinton has done nothing to cope with Saddam's unconventional arsenal except to spin the situation...

...In August 1995, Hussein Kamil Hassan alMajid and his entourage defected to Jordan...

...His planning aimed to crack international support for the courageous U.N...

...It's no surprise to hear recent reports that Iraq had UNSCOM under such tight surveillance that it was able to anticipate the snap inspection targets...

...In spite of the accumulating evidence of American weakness, Albright with rare exception continued to promote the White House line and play Pollyanna after her elevation to secretary of state...

...There was no Iraqi charm campaign...

...33 Election Year Drill Yet the Clinton administra tion had long been unwilling to back UNSCOM's aggressive approach, as it emerged in early 1996...

...And it is absorbed through the skin...

...32 January 1998 . The American Spectator Saddam turned to his tightly controlled government organs to create an appearance of national unity and set the groundwork for the crisis...

...must do so...

...But the seemingly ringing tones of this warning obscured a fundamental misstatement of the crisis...

...In June Saddam rolled up another INA sponsored conspiracy...

...After the election, in Bush's waning days as president, Saddam staged a series of provocations, including blocking UNSCOM inspectors...

...military men for allegedly plotting to sell thirty-four Bell OH-58A helicopters to Iraq...

...These devices could be used either on the battlefield or for a terrorist strike...

...The staffer felt that the U.S...

...This kind of threat, however, is taken very seriously by Iraq's possible targets...

...Not only did the administration allow Primakov to assert his old role as the protector of Saddam Hussein, it allowed a large element of hypocrisy to reenter the campaign against the terror weapons...

...The INA was dominated by ex-Baathists, from the same radical nationalist party that spawned Saddam Hussein, and was thoroughly penetrated by Iraqi intelligence...

...VX: This nerve agent, invented by a British scientist in the early 1950's, is the most lethal chemical agent known in the West...

...In spite of official denials, some of the aid almost certainly wound up in Saddam's all-out effort to develop weapons of mass destruction...

...The West atoned for some of this greed and blindness when it fought the Gulf War, but to an astonishing extent, some of this pattern of denial reappeared in its aftermath, when the West was given clear evidence that Saddam had gone further with these programs than anyone had feared...

...Anthrax: Iraq has acknowledged producing 2,265 gallons of the anthrax agent...

...Customs said Iraq planned to outfit sixteen of them "to disperse airborne chemicals...

...sanctions on Iraq...

...Saddam would comply minimally with UNSCOM's demands until sanctions were lifted, and then go back into the terror weapon business...

...The Security Council must increase its support for us...

...He made the famous statement that as a Baptist, he believed in death-bed conversions...

...The U.S.-made helicopters were sold as surplus by the Canadian military under restrictions preventing their resale to American enemies such as Iraq...

...suspects that Iraq is still hiding dozens of SCUD missiles and holds a number of "special warheads" modified to deliver chemical and biological agents...

...JAMEs RING ADAMS is a TAS investigative writer...

...Even more chilling was the warning from the former head of Iraqi military intelligence General Wafiq Samarrai that the allies had to eliminate the biological agents...

...One, a former press adviser to Saddam, predicted accurately in September 1995 that the tyrant would give up no more proscribed agents or delivery systems...

...military umbrella, weakening the U.S: backed Iraqi National Congress (INC...

...Instead the Clinton administration let them take the initiative on the ground and limited its response to an ineffectual cruise missile strike on air defense sites in southern Iraq...

...In spite of the revelations, however, Iraq refused to turn over physical samples of the agents...

...Although Defense Secretary William Cohen seems genuinely alarmed and may press successfully for a punitive strike on Saddam, one has to worry about the diplomacy that sought a bailout in Russian mediation...

...Army colonel who served for nine years in the Arkansas House of Representatives and ran for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in 1994...

...Clinton responded with a New York Times interview indicating he was willing to come to terms with Saddam...

...The Bush administration had tried it as a potential opposition movement and found it wanting...

...If VX were to fall onto a surface, whether pre-positioned U.S...

...Saving Face As the crisis developed, Clinton defined it as an issue for the United Nations—rather than Washington—to handle, thereby giving dither room to U.N...

...On November 13, Saddam responded to the passage of yet one more virtually meaningless U.N...

...officials...

...There are no documents to support this claim, and Iraqi personnel allegedly involved in the destruction program gave UNSCOM conflicting accounts...

...Like other leaders of Detroit's Chaldean (Christian Arab) community, Danou, an Iraqi native and naturalized U.S...

...Security Council resolution, banning the travel of Iraqi officials who did not travel, by finally expelling the U.S...

...For co-author Mylroie, however, a turning point came when a group of Iraqi opposition leaders visited Washington in April 1993...

...weapons inspectors in large part because of weakness in Washington...

...If the missile detonated only after hitting the ground, it would not cause extenThe American Spectator • January 1998 sive damage...

...But Saddam's scheming paralleled months of the Clinton administration's wavering support of UNSCOM's work...

...In June an UNSCOM team surrounded a site suspected of holding SCUD missiles, while Iraqi officials prevented them from entering the compound...

...aircraft carriers in the Gulf using specially rigged crop-dusting aircraft...

...The recommendations from that meeting will be subject to the approval of the Security Council...

...With this shaky start, most Iraq analysts began warning of a "charm campaign...

...Although one press report said the immediate cause was that U.N...

...man, an arsenal of chemical and biological agents that could wipe out the world's population many times over...

...citizen, Danou has a perfect right to raise political money and advocate a policy position...

...Why did the administration take so long to acknowledge the danger...

...A look at just two of his main operational weapons, anthrax and VX nerve gas, is bone-chilling, and he has more under development...

...Two years later, however, this warning was confirmed beyond any doubt...

...But it was the responsibility of the White House not to lead him on and send a message that its Iraq policy was open to influence...

...Bush launched a last strike on Baghdad...

...Embassy in Tokyo during its terror campaign in early 1995, but failed to poison anyone because of the lack of effective dispersal...

...A little-noticed incident this July indicated that Iraq is pursuing even more dangerous transports...

...There is no reason to doubt that it still has that fully lethal stockpile, since anthrax, unlike some other biowar agents, has an extremely long shelf-life...

...Ambassador Albright called up a senior UNSCOM official to say, 'We don't want to see any more articles like that...

...Because Commander in Chief Clinton failed to protect us from the start, Saddam Hussein now has his number and the world is again a very dangerous place.BY LAURIE MYLROIE AND JAMES RING ADAMS addam Hussein's showdown with United Nations arms inspectors must rank as the most serious foreign crisis President Clinton has faced to this date...

...Ekeus led the commission with great nerve and ability, and his successor, the Australian arms control veteran Richard Butler, was an unknown quantity...

...citizen, has long called for easing the sanctions because of the hardship suffered by Iraqi civilians...

...LAURIE MYLROIE, who advised the Clinton campaign on Iraq in 1992, is a senior associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and co-author of Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (Random House...

...response to the Irbil attack...

...and the Iraqi interests section in Washington, as well as appropriate U.S...

...Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, which transformed John Kennedy from a political playboy to a national hero, this confrontation underscores all the questions about Clinton's character raised by his past scandals, great and small...

...A recent Israeli report suggested that the country's authorities, who endured repeated SCUD attacks during the Gulf War, are now concerned about low tech spray attacks...

...Special Commission for Iraq (UNSCOM), set up by the U.N...

...But a crack in the facade of long-standing principled toughness showed up just two days later...

...Infighting flared dangerously among Kurdish factions living autonomously in northern Iraq under the U.S...

...They can just stop our work at any time...

...Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, one of the most formidable diplomats on today's scene, is an old KGB hand steeped in the Soviet connection to Saddam...

...As recently as last October 27, in a public address at the University of Kentucky, she still counted Iraq among the Administration's successes...

...Saddam may have hoped for a weakening in UNSCOM after the departure in July of its original executive chairman Rolf Ekeus, now the Swedish ambassador to the United States...

...The White House stood by as a Kurdish faction, frustrated with the Clinton administration's long neglect of the region, turned to Baghdad and, with the help of Saddam's Republican Guards, captured Irbil, the headquarters of the Congress...

...As Saddam's son-in-law and head of his unconventional weapons procurement program, he carried first-hand knowledge of the whole Iraqi quest for terror weapons...

...Basically, the U.S...

...The American Spectator • January 1998 While commemorating Veterans' Day at Arlington National Cemetery, Clinton affirmed, "Saddam's efforts to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction and his interference with the United Nations inspectors who are keeping him from doing so are unacceptable...

...In May 1996, a mid-level NSC staffer warned that Saddam was gaining ground all around in his efforts to break out of the post-Gulf War restraints...

...In March, Iraqi officials delayed a number of UNSCOM inspections...

...Yet when a reporter asked Albright if it was a "carrot" to Iraq, remarking that the session was not originally scheduled, Albright answered, "No, it was [scheduled...

...He said that the idea for the fundraiser came in the first place from DNC moneyman Mark Thomann...

...His posturing has left America exposed, vulnerable, and at risk...

...Sadly, one of the men under arrest, Robert Fairchild, 52, of Little Rock is a former U.S...

...The Nature of the Threat Almost no one is now able to deny the gravity of the threat from Saddam's arsenal...

...Mylroie passed the news to one of Clinton's NSC officials with the statement that she and other Iraq analysts had fundamentally misunderstood Saddam...

...The Iraqi campaign paid off in covert supply shipments and U.S...

...Or was it so lacking in a moral core, so driven by transient posturing that it was incapable of providing for the national defense in the face of Sad-dam Hussein's determined evil...

...Furthermore, it maintains its capacity to produce more...

...Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, son of the legendary General Mustapha Barzani, warned that Iraq was still working on proscribed weapons programs, especially biological agents, and hiding them from UNSCOM...

...His defection triggered a series of horrifying discoveries, decisively refuting the widespread Western belief that most of Iraq's unconventional weapons had been destroyed during the Gulf War (see "Saddam's Germs," TAS, November 1995...

...There he was shown a cache of over one million documents from the weapons programs, all allegedly concealed on Kamil's orders...

...Iraq has acknowledged producing 3.9 tons of VX, although as with the anthrax agent, it makes the unproved claim that it destroyed this stockpile unilaterally...

...Harvard Professor Matthew Meselson recently told "6o Minutes" that the Japanese religious sect Aum Shinrikyo had tried to release the anthrax agent near the U.S...

...arms inspectors of the U.N...

...He stated that Saddam had a stock of SCUD-ready anthrax warheads regarded by the regime as its "weapon of last resort...

...UNSCOM has reported Iraqi tests of spraying tanks which could be mounted on airplanes to spread lethal agents...

...Save for the last sentence this was a Russian text, with the dangerous purport that UNSCOM's technical mission would be politicized to hasten the lifting of sanctions, even as Saddam retained his supplies of chemical and biological weapons...

...meeting in Geneva...

...Faced with a responsibility not usually given to U.N...

...The key to that attack was Saddam's Republican Guards...

...The charge is false, Danou said, and comes out of local rivalries...

...Although the NSC official expressed concern, nothing happened...

...As they preprared to assault Irbil, they marched across an open plain in an area north of the 36th parallel, the "nofly zone" patrolled by the aircraft of the Gulf War coalition...

...ambassador to the U.N., was moving to have the Security Council declare Iraq in "material breach" of the cease-fire...

...During this meeting, Ekeus discovered just how seriously his commission had been compromised...

...conveniently overlooked in the effort to build the Gulf War coalition...

...The problem wasn't just that Saddam might be trying to rebuild his terror arsenal as he blocked UNSCOM's inspections...

...sought to build support for a tougher international position toward Baghdad, Clinton began to suggest just what was at stake...

...Clinton was slow to explain that publicly, and when he did so, he obfuscated the fact that he himself had long allowed the threat to go unchecked, even as Saddam was emboldened to take on the U.N...

...During the 199z presidential campaign, Clinton staked out a tougher position than Bush toward Saddam, particularly on human rights...

...As the U.S...

...Danou was one of eleven bidders to build a casino at the Pontiac Silverdome, the subject of an entirely separate Clinton fundraising scandal, and said he was eliminated early on because of the Iraqi controversy...

...Far from rebuilding his weapons of mass destruction, the danger Clinton identifies, Saddam already possesses large quantities of biological and chemical agents, along with the means to spread them throughout the Middle East and even the United States...

...Massoud has his faults—he later took help from Saddam in crushing his rivals in Irbil in August 1996 —but as former head of intelligence for his father, he usually had good information...

...It was widely rumored that the White House was furious at Deutch for his remarks and that that was the reason why Deutch did not get the cabinet post he had expected, Secretary of Energy, if not Secretary of Defense, in the second Clinton administration...

...It left the distinct impression that it was prepared to lift sanctions while Saddam remained in power, a distinct reversal of Bush administration policy...

...In spite of the high profile, however, this case was covered extensively only in Little Rock and Tampa...

...On hearing the reply, Kamil ordered that the man leave the room, explaining that he worked for Iraqi intelligence...

...Without the knowledge of this staffer, or the INC for that matter, it had shifted the bulk of its support to a rival group, the Iraqi National Accord (INA...

...But Clinton's attitude toward Saddam has long been a puzzle, at some times subject to abrupt changes and at others divorced from reality...

...The current concern about chemical and biological weapons stands in stark contrast to the complacency of 1996 and 1997, when the threat became incontrovertible...

...After an initial flurry of excitement, however, these discoveries were swept under what became a very lumpy rug...

...A handful of skeptics still try to minimize this threat by arguing that the lethal effect is limited without an effective delivery system...

...The trick, however, is to cause these warheads to burst in mid-air to give the lethal agents the widest dispersal without incinerating them...

...If you need to buy foreign policy, go to the DNC...

...blundered badly in accepting Russian mediation...

...At the November 24 Security Council meeting, Russia and the U.S...

...This highly experienced official underscored the fragility of UNSCOM's position in Iraq...

...Saddam also may have thought he could exploit diplomatic cracks in the Security Council itself...

...He said he didn't know about the attempt in the White House to cancel the meeting until he read about it in the Wall Street Journal this October...

...The Clinton administration merely adopted the position that the new revelations would ensure that sanctions would remain on Iraq for a long time to come and it acted as if little had changed...

...On July 21, U.S...

...As a U.S...

...But Iraq is putting serious effort into getting all the delivery systems it needs...

...These craft, also known as the Kiowa Warrior, have been called the world's most versatile armed reconnaissance helicopters...

...dithering during the presidential campaign...

...Security Council after the 1991 Gulf War, who have stubbornly tracked Iraq's weapons of mass destruction...

...But the White House rejected this proposal in favor of simply maintaining the status quo...

...But Washington was tepid just as UNSCOM began a series of more aggressive searches for Saddam's hidden stockpiles...

...The administration has dealt with the Iraq crisis with denial, heavy spin control and outright dissimulation...

...In June a senior UNSCOM official warned, "The central question is what is the United States prepared to do regarding Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction...

...inspectors were on the verge of locating a cache of Iraq's deadly nerve gas, Saddam had been preparing for the confrontation for months...

...Most likely passing on a message from the White House, she asked him to "stress the positive" in his next report, emphasizing all the material UNSCOM had destroyed...

...should intervene to stop the intra-Kurdish fighting and bolster the INC...

...The Russian initiative was face-saving for Clinton even more than for Saddam, and it made the effort to control Iraq much more difficult...

...If optimally spread out, Iraq's stockpile could kill billions...

...On September 6,1996, in his New York Times column, A. M. Rosenthal detailed Saddam's continued enjoyment of his arsenal of terror weapons and related it to the feckless U.S...

...If the situation is left unresolved, we will The American Spectator • January 1998 come to see the Gulf War as a brief parenthesis with no lasting significance...

...Was it simply trying to 36 January 1998 • The American Spectator keep the issue out of the presidential election...

...We are at their complete mercy...

...Without support from Washington, UNSCOM had to call off its siege...

...The New York Times gave it a mere four paragraphs, noting only that the helicopters were adapted for "spraying pesticides...

...Security Council [UNSCOM] to meet on November 21 in New York to discuss and advise, among other important issues, ways to make UNSCOM's work more effective on the basis of the resolutions of the U.N...

...The West, above all the United States, missed a unique opportu nity to strike a major part of Saddam's armored forces...

...Kamil and his family later returned to Iraq with guarantees of protection, and were promptly murdered on their arrival...

...In his first report to the Security Council, in early October, Butler wrote, "There is incomprehension of why Iraq is persisting so strongly with both refusing to make the facts known about its biological weapons program and why it is so insistent on blocking the commission's own efforts to reach those facts...

...The October 29 order, issued by Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, expelling Americans from UNSCOM, referred to a March 16 cabinet meeting in which Foreign Minister Mohammad Sahhaf briefed his colleagues on his discussions in New York about UNSCOM's position on Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction, the key to lifting U.N...

...As UNSCOM began to digest this trove (sometimes called the "Chicken Coop Papers"), Ekeus proceeded to Amman to interview Kamil...

...When given a choice between peaceful and violent means to an end, Saddam preferred violence...

...It's not clear whether Baghdad has mastered this technology, but it takes only one properly detonated biological warhead to wipe out a city...

...CIA chief John Deutchacknowledged to Congress that Saddam was stronger after attacking Irbil than before...

...Anthrax is extraordinarily lethal, producing death in most cases after the inhalation of just one-ninth of a millionth of a gram...

...This language would have authorized the use of force, but the White House felt she was moving too fast...

...Although Clinton administration officials swore they made no concessions, they did so, as the text of the Geneva communiqué baldly stated...

...UNSCOM's position, then as now, is that Iraq continued massively to violate the post-war U.N...

...The parallel plant was never used for VX and escaped destruction, but the technology is completely transferable...

...Security Council...

...Permanent members Russia, France, and China and current member Egypt have wanted to move more quickly toward ending sanctions...

...34 January 1998 • The American Spectator Danou has filed suit in a Michigan court against another local Arab businessman who wrote the DNC last year charging that Danou was in business with a son of Saddam Hussein...

...support while also using the time to remove Saddam's terror weapons...

...military equipment in the Gulf or the door of a building in downtown Tel Aviv, it would remain lethal for several weeks...

...Iraq furthermore has pursued other dispersal methods that are stealthier and technologically easier...

...Saddam Hussein remains trapped in a strategic box," she said, "unable to threaten Iraq's neighbors or us...

...Although UNSCOM destroyed one plant dedicated to making VX, Iraq developed a duplicate facility for manufacturing pesticides...

...What has happened is that there are regular meetings of this UNSCOM commission...

...Danou asked for a private meeting with Clinton before the affair, which raised more than $400,000...

...Bill Clinton's persona as the lovable rogue may explain public tolerance of his glaring ethical lapses, but the lack of moral starch is coming home in his irresolute response to the most dangerous threat now facing the lives of Americans, America's friends, and the world...

...The UNSCOM faceoff The current crisis erupted on October 29 when Baghdad ordered UNSCOM's American staff to leave Iraq within a week...

...As the session began, Kamil asked the name of Ekeus's Arab interpreter...

...It claimed that it had unilaterally destroyed whatever material was unaccounted for, but provided no independent proof...

...The post–Gulf War policy of the Bush administration made strategic sense, even if it was open to criticism...

...bureaucrats, Annan wasted an entire week in sending a hollow and pointless mission to Baghdad to tell Saddam he had to comply...

...All that Baghdad was willing to provide were documents and information...

...But a Democratic National Committee official protested, and told the Senate committee that the meeting went forward...

...The Clinton White House has started talking about Sad-dam's chemical and biological danger very late in the game, after turning a deaf ear to years of repeated warning...

...The opposition Iraqi National Congress, which has excellent Baghdad sources, reported last summer that agricultural aircraft had been converted into unmanned drones, suitable for a spray attack...

...the estimated deaths exceeded one million...

...That was how he had operatedall his life and achieved what he had achieved...

...UNSCOM wasn't the only group to suffer from U.S...

...But the White House not only tried to quiet the issue, it let its quest for campaign financing compromise its policy of firmly supporting the U.N...

...As the U.N...

...The Associated Press International Report carried the story on November 4, 1996, with this comment from Republican National Committee spokesman Ed Gillespie, "The word is out in the international community: If you need to buy hamburgers, go to McDonald's...

...The end-game would come in the GA" he warned...

...In New York, Madeleine Albright, then U.S...

...The irony is that Moscow in its "evil empire" days helped supply Baghdad with the know-how for some of its most dangerous chemical and biological agents, a fact the U.S...

...He sounded tough on Meet the Press on Sunday, November 9, calling for "very strong and unambiguous action" to force Saddam to comply with the inspections...

...Top officials did the Sunday talk show circuit to reinforce the image...

...government backed financing...

...The U.S...

...But Danou confirmed his long-standing effort to ease the sanctions, which included contacts with Iraqi diplomats at the U.N...

...As for the relation between Saddam and the international community, the situation is that the war is not over...

...the problem was that he had managed to keep much of it substantially intact and Clinton had done nothing about it...

...Under Butler, however, UNSCOM continued to focus on Iraq's most sensitive secrets, its arsenal of the deadliest biological toxins known to man, complete with the crucial delivery systems...

...team withdrew, Iraq spirited away the SCUDs...

...The problem wasn't that Saddam might be trying torebuild his terror arsenal as he blocked UNSCOM'sinspections...

...35 Stales of Denial Over the past two decades, the U.S...

...Yet in the preceding two days, Iraq's rubber-stamp parliament had convened, its deliberations culminating in a "recommendation," publicly announced on October 27, to Saddam's government to freeze ties with UNSCOM...

...He has failed to deal seriously with a threat that was apparent at least since late 1995 and in fact during the election campaign undercut the one group, UNSCOM, that was doing anything...

...has often seemed to conduct Iraqi affairs in a state of psychological denial...

...Oki 37...

...In exchange for Baghdad's help, the Kurds allowed Saddam to decimate the INC, scattering or killing his opponents...

...When it appeared, U.N...

...Anxious to extricate itself in the easiest possible manner from this confrontation, the administration hurriedly turned to other intermediaries, including Moscow...

...We are nothing in Baghdad," he said...

...According to documents released at the Senate fundraising hearings in October, White House staff sought to cancel the private meeting, apparently aware that it would undercut the administration's Iraqi policy...

...Polls in the immediate aftermath showed a majority of Americans approved the president's performance...

...Danou told TAS that he met President Clinton before the affair as part of a "Greeting Committee" of twelve local eminences, who walked him to the podium...

...The UNSCOM board meeting was a special emergency session called by Russia...

...In the summer of 1995, the U.S...

...After Kamil's escape to Jordan, two other prominent defectors warned that Saddam was prepared to use the newly revealed agents...

...resolution forbidding its possession of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons...

...It read: The participants in the meeting supported the intention of the Special Commission of the U.N...