Presswatch: All Monica, All the Time
Corry, John
PRESSWATCH by John Corry All Monica, All the Time T hey gave a war, but nobody came. The confrontation with Iraq ended not with a bang but a whimper. Kofi Annan and Tariq Aziz held a press...
...Actually, it was a dopey idea in the first place...
...The American Spectator April 1998 51...
...Clinton said he was skeptical, but that, even so, he would accept the agreement with Saddam...
...Eisenhower denied he had authorized a U-2 flight...
...The Post, however, did not specify the date of the attack, although February 26 was a good bet...
...networks were excluded...
...Foreign policy was not among them...
...But the first question was whether the United States had "the moral right" to bomb, and then there was booing and shouting...
...Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Clinton had signed off on "an intense, four-day, round-the-clock bombardment...
...Albright looked flustered, while Berger appeared stunned, and Cohen seemed ready to cry...
...If Mrs...
...If F-i5's were poised to strike Baghdad when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Reagan would have spoken to "my fellow Americans" from the Oval Office and told them why...
...Understandably, he was uncomfortable...
...Clinton lies, however, to cover up contemptible personal behavior...
...Hillary Clinton, it seems, had insisted...
...The day after the Pentagon pep rally, Albright, Cohen, and national security adviser Sandy Berger went to Ohio State...
...He fails as a man, and that means he is without the moral authority to order other men into battle...
...Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott made page one in the Times when they said we should not just bomb...
...The whole world would be watching...
...He seems to know this himself...
...How could this be, the old butcher must have wondered...
...how could Clinton be the commander-in-chief...
...War fever was growing...
...Iraqis stopped thinking about Monica Lewinsky...
...Kofi Annan and Tariq Aziz held a press conference at three in the morning, and more or less that was it...
...The first explosions would come sometime after 3 a.m...
...Meanwhile, the media campaign went on...
...He talked instead about domestic policy...
...Clinton probably has wondered himself...
...The old ones had suggested CNN was the official network for the crisis, and, in a way, it really was...
...Peace broke out, and the networks stood down...
...If the idea was to buck up Clinton, it failed...
...The national interest was held hostage while the president recited the laundry list...
...It was supposed to include 30o flights a day and hundreds of cruise missiles...
...Clinton tried to make amends the next day...
...Aha, you thought, at least that one came from the heart...
...The White House did not have a coherent policy on Iraq, but it pretended it did, and opened a media campaign to prove it...
...How we would do this was unclear, but sounding bellicose seldom hurts Republican leaders, and it would not do if the Democrats got ahead of them...
...it was "a good old-fashioned American debate," and Saddam Hussein should not doubt our firmness...
...Iraqi TV, however, could do whatever it wanted, and it repeatedly showed CNN footage in which Madeleine Albright was heckled and screamed at...
...Nothing improved after that...
...Monica may have kept us from going to war...
...It seemed like a good idea...
...The day before, she had stood at his side and nodded in agreement when he said he had never had a sexual relationship with "that woman...
...Hugh Shelton called Secretary of Defense William Cohen "an extraordinary man...
...we should go in and depose Saddam...
...50 Apri1 1998 The American Spectator lend-lease destroyers...
...It also reported that"bombing plans have been expanded" to include "the Mukhabarat, or general intelligence service...
...Now he no longer had to pretend he was something he was not...
...Dan Rather did a practice session on CBS, describing the aircraft being used in a bombing run on Baghdad, and when thepractice session inadvertently was transmitted by satellite, some CBS affiliates thought it was the real thing...
...Sad-dam, Clinton said, could not put his vast "presidential palaces" off limits to weapons inspectors...
...Kofi Annan made his quick trip, and announced that hostilities were over...
...If that was true, Saddam might have known something the media did not...
...She had provided the essential fig leaf, and clearly he now owed her...
...The bright side, though, was that Bill Clinton regained some lost dignity...
...Then Cohen praised Al Gore for his "firm and steady hand on our nation's foreign diplomacy," and then Gore introduced Clinton, campaign style, as "the man whose leadership and commitment to our nation's security and strength have done so much for the cause of peace and freedom...
...Recall the State of the Union speech in January...
...Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen...
...On the other hand, Albright wrote an essay for Newsweek in which she said air strikes were fine, but that "toppling Saddam" was out of the question...
...the Republican Guard and its special subsidiaries," and so on...
...Other U.S...
...There was Monica again...
...FDR said he had not made up his mind about helping Britain when he already had dispatched And Saddam Hussein emerges unscathed...
...Gingrich and Lott might not have noticed, and Albright would not tell them, but we do not have enough soldiers in place to do it...
...It was the darkest night of the month, and it did not conflict with the Olympics, Ramadan, the annual pilgrimage by Muslims to Mecca, the president's trip to Africa, or parents' weekend at Stanford...
...Baghdad time, when lookouts are at their drowsiest," the Washington Post reported...
...Lewinsky's ample shadow hovered over the crisis in more ways than one, and one of them wasthe difficulty it created, for Iraqis or Americans, or anyone other than Tony Blair, to take Our President seriously...
...In his one-hour address, Clinton barely mentioned Iraq, even though carriers were in the Persian Gulf, and bombing runs were being planned...
...And everyone thought we would...
...The "town meeting" at Ohio State, for instance, had been a joint White House-CNN production...
...The New York Times reported, however, that "some administration officials fretted" that the Ohio event had caused him to do just that...
...Indeed one of the government snoops who attach themselves to journalists said she was "very sexy...
...Everyone knew, or thought they knew, how and when it would be carried out...
...The press often reminds us now of his ability to "compartmentalize"—"In the gaudy mansions of Clinton's mind there are many rooms," a recent piece in Time began —but deep down, you suspect, it's Monica, Monica all the time...
...When Clinton spoke from the Pentagon, he talked about a nebulous "international community" and what we seemed to owe it...
...Presidents are forgiven when they lie about matters of state...
...Correspondents were pulled out of Baghdad, and CNN had to find new promos...
...CNN has a potential international audience of 800 million, complemented by two radio networks and seven Internet sites...
...As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, "only the street addresses were missing...
...The secretary of state was a casualty in a media-minded administration's media-minded war...
...Their consensus was that war was imminent...
...What had happened was not a debacle, he said...
...Imagine Sad-dam Hussein in the television room of one of his marble palaces, staring at the pudding-faced man he saw on-screen...
...After all, Clinton added, "we're not talking about a few rooms here with delicate personal matters involved...
...For as Newsweek reported, until Albright turned up on television, Lewinsky was "the most-talked-about American woman in Baghdad...
...Clinton gave a televised speech at the Pentagon, although it was notable mostly for its listlessness, and the pep rally his handlers staged around it...
...Clinton had not done this, her husband's presidency would have been finished...
...It was hardly a call to arms, although there was one provocative sentence...
...The Times quoted Cohen, who said Clinton had asked his aides if they agreed with the plan, and when they said they did, Clinton said, "Let's do it...
...the Special Security Organization run by his [ Saddam's] younger son...
...The rally began, as a Washington Post editorial later noted, "with an inappropriate and trivializing ritual of sycophantic self-praise...
...The White House wanted to show the world the firm face of American resolve...
...Commentators noted after the State of the Union that the laundry list of initiatives Clinton put forth reflected not his but his wife's priorities...
...No matter, though...
...If anyone at the Pentagon, State Department, or National Security Council had called for a strong statement on Iraq—and surely someone had—their pleas had been ignored...
Vol. 31 • April 1998 • No. 4
