Our Parties and Our President

...The Wolfowitz plan calls for the creation of a "liberated zone" in southern Iraq where opposition forces can rally, provide safe haven for defectors from Saddam's regime, and establish a genuine alternative to the Saddam tyranny...

...History will smile on these Republicans...

...Military planners seemed to be targeting Saddam Hussein's elite forces in the hopes of stirring a general uprising in the regular army...

...Saddam may or may not have been surprised by the timing of the attack, but the scope of the attack was probably smaller than what he had anticipated...

...By the tenor of their arguments, House Democrats sought to demonize and delegitimize their opponents...

...And for good reason...

...Early in Friday's debate, Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut called the impeachment resolution a "constitutional assassination" perpetrated by "provocateurs" and motivated by a "naked partisanship almost without lawful and civil bounds...

...Perhaps now that these fictions have been exploded, the Clinton administration, as well as the Congress and the American people, will be forced to confront the stark realities...

...For his undeniable crimes, and for his defilement of the presidency in the concealment of those crimes, William Jefferson Clinton has been justly impeached...

...strikes did not target the facilities where Iraq is known to be developing chemical and biological weapons, for fear of unleashing those horrors on innocent Iraqi civilians...

...Elsewhere, the Conyers report blithely announces there is "no dispute" that Clinton's gifts to Lewinsky were returned to Betty Currie on December 28 of last year...

...He was distracted, "thinking as fast as he could"—planning a falsehood, in other words—"as he just realized that someone was setting him up...

...In this effort they will likely be supported by U.N...

...Because of the president's bizarre concern about bombing Iraq during Ramadan (has anyone told the president that Iraq is run by a secular Baathist party...

...the agonized floor speeches of GOP moderates like Tom Campbell of California and Nancy Johnson of Connecticut...

...It was sputtering of a particularly dishonorable and sinister sort...

...It is unlikely that U.N...

...Unfortunately, the Pentagon admits that U.S...

...The last time the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles at Iraq, then-CIA director John Deutch candidly noted that the attack had only made Saddam stronger...

...We will probably never know to what extent the military action succeeded in "degrading" his weapons programs, or indeed whether it had any effect on them at all...

...Were Deutch around today, he'd be making the same assessment...

...I have accepted responsibility for what I did wrong in my personal life," Clinton oozed in his brief remarks Saturday afternoon...

...Clinton wasn't paying attention to Bennett's misleading remarks to Judge Susan Webber Wright, according to the Judiciary Democrats...

...David Tell, for the Editors THE END OF THE CLINTON IRAQ POLICY Last week's air and missile attacks on Iraq, for all the damage they inflicted, didn't accomplish much of lasting importance...

...A military campaign that started with several weeks of devastating air strikes and ended with a ground attack on Saddam's forces in Iraq would stand a high chance of success—if the president gave the U.S...

...And in order to whitewash that stain, House Democrats have sought to stain the Congress as well...

...If he does let the inspectors back in, it will only be to buy more time and to drive an even deeper wedge between Washington and the rest of the Security Council...

...resolutions and American demands he has spent the last year or more rejecting...

...Which is what nearly every Democratic representative did on the floor of the House last Friday and Saturday...

...Unlike the failed strategy of containment, which could never deliver what it promised, deterrence would lower our expectations as it diminished our security...

...For the past year and more, the Clinton administration's policy toward Iraq has been built around three objectives: first, to keep a fragile consensus at the U.N...

...By those votes, a narrow House Republican majority, with support from only a few men of conscience across the aisle, did something almost never seen in American politics of the television age...

...Elsewhere still, conversely, the Conyers report rejects out of hand the possibility that Clinton was tampering with witnesses in January when he privately told his senior aides he had never touched the intern...

...Nor will Saddam be deterred by last week's bombing from playing his usual cat-and-mouse games...

...But neither do we hesitate to say that the Republican party, at least in the House of Representatives, has now fulfilled the ultimate responsibility imposed on it by that controversy—to an extent, and with a courage, that puts paid to our every past criticism...

...Whichever course one prefers, these are the kinds of options the Clinton administration and members of Congress must begin to take seriously...

...secretary general Kofi Annan, whose opposition to the U.S...

...Saddam is probably breathing a sigh of relief, not shuddering in fear...

...force, an organized and well-supplied Iraqi opposition could quickly emerge as a dire threat to Saddam's hold on power—something that air strikes alone can never be...

...To blunt the result of a constitutionally sanctioned and duly ordered inquiry into presidential malfeasance, these Democrats have seen fit loudly to proclaim— from the floor of the United States House of Represen-tatives—that Clinton's impeachment is, instead, the product of a banana-republic legislature run by madmen...

...forces and the will to use them...

...A strategy of deterrence is fraught with perils: How will we prevent Saddam from brandishing weapons of mass destruction to bully his neighbors...

...inspections regime as the principal means of discovering and eliminating Iraq's programs for developing weapons of mass destruction...

...And moments later, the president had the effrontery to praise Gephardt for this astonishing slander...

...This magazine has never hesitated to point out these GOP weaknesses...

...Will we invade Iraq with conventional forces if we know he has weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them...

...Early last week, John Conyers's Judiciary Committee minority released a 93-page dissenting report on impeachment that tacitly concedes the president is guilty of perjury...

...But at least a policy of deterrence would have the virtue of clarity...

...By debate's end, Tom Lantos of California had likened the House impeachment proceedings to "Stalin's parliament" and Hitler's "Reichstag...

...the votes themselves are what counted...

...One is deterrence: Accept the fact that he is going to acquire weapons of mass destruction and hope that we can deter him from using them against his neighbors (not to mention against us...

...The bombing may well have "degraded" Saddam's conventional military forces and infrastructure, but over time he will rebuild them, just as he did after the far more devastating Gulf War seven years ago...

...Now that the bombing has stopped, we can expect those three nations to work even harder to lift economic sanctions and begin normalizing relations with Saddam...

...Russia and France are openly hostile to Butler, whom they blame for providing the pretext for last week's attack, and they will demand that he be either removed or muzzled...

...The containment of Saddam Hussein is a myth...

...The old game is over...

...Finally, no one should imagine that Saddam will be cowed by this attack into complying with the U.N...

...He could not have known then that his staff would be called before [Ken Starr's] grand jury," the Judiciary Democrats insist...

...Even if he doesn't use them, his mere possession of such weapons will radically alter the strategic balance in the Middle East to the detriment of our interests and those of our closest allies...

...At a time of utmost political sensitivity—the most important congressional vote in decades—the Demo- cratic House minority has seen fit to prostitute itself to the personal interests of a Democratic president...

...Backed by credible U.S...

...Given the hostile reactions of France, China, and Russia, which withdrew its ambassador in protest against the U.S...

...Now here's the good news...

...House minority whip David Bonior, standing next to him at a press conference, eagerly assented: "I couldn't agree more with what Tom Lantos has just said...

...To succeed, the opposition would have to be backed not only by American financial and military assistance—which Congress this year voted to provide in the Iraq Liberation Act—but also by American military power, both from the air and, if necessary, on the ground...

...What about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction...

...policy is to ensure that Iraq never develops or uses weapons of mass destruction—and this should be the goal—then the only way to achieve this with any confidence is to take Saddam out...

...But House Democrats en masse—joining the Clinton White House in rhetorical perversion and exposing the insincerity of their censure motion all at once— were unwilling to acknowledge that any decent person could believe in the justice of impeachment...

...A month ago there was almost unanimity there on the need to attack Iraq, a remarkable moment which Clinton tragically squandered when he called off that attack...

...Even if Saddam were to allow the inspectors back in—and he probably won't—UNSCOM is a spent force...

...So now we have this situation: Bill Clinton has stained the executive branch...

...Such is the nature of any complicated lie...

...Immediately following the vote, surrounded by his party's caucus, House minority leader Dick Gephardt had the effrontery, on the White House lawn, to castigate his own institution as a "disgrace to our country and our Constitution...

...Now that fragile and temporary consensus has been shattered, perhaps permanently...

...The Clinton administration has at times flirted with the idea of moving to a strategy of deter-rence—though it has been loath to admit this publicly...

...attack, it is ludicrous to imagine that the United States will be able to rebuild a consensus in the Security Council for continued tough action against Iraq...

...The House Republicans risked their political futures to pursue an apparently unpopular objective—and did so because they thought it necessary to preserve the integrity of our constitutional order...

...The U.N...

...The stakes could hardly be higher...

...Impeachment of such a president would plainly seem, at the very least, a plausible option...

...If the goal of U.S...

...Last week's strikes may not have shaken the pillars of Saddam's regime, but they have destroyed the pillars of the Clinton administration's Iraq policy and blasted away the myths and delusions in which that policy has been enshrouded...

...Administration officials have long admitted that the third objective was more wishful thinking than practical strategy: Saddam has proved more adept at quashing coup attempts than the CIA is in fomenting them...

...And what of the Democratic party in all this...

...Meanwhile, you can say good-bye to the U.N...

...But officials admit they were just "rolling the dice...

...Then, pressed to the wall, they wind up wholly unmoored from fact and evidence, reduced to mere sputtering...

...Former undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz has outlined a coherent and credible strategy for supporting forces in Iraq who want to challenge Saddam's control...

...Since the Clinton administration gives no sign of seriously supporting Saddam's many opponents in Iraq, such an uprising is unlikely...

...There have always been only two coherent strategies for dealing with Saddam...

...Our House of Representatives, Lantos told America, has become "a totalitarian legislative body...

...By the language of the Democratic party's preferred fix to the Lewinsky scandal—a congressional resolution of censure against the president—Bill Clinton has "egregiously failed" the test of his constitutional oath, "violated the trust of the American people," and "dishonored the office which they entrusted to him...

...The alternative to deterrence is a strategy to remove Saddam Hussein from power once and for all...

...But eloquence and drama are as nothing in the grand scheme of things...

...they may never live a nobler moment...

...And the Republican party, sure enough, has all too often in recent years disappointed us with graceless or timid leadership...

...They still exist, and we do not hesitate to acknowledge that they have occasionally revealed themselves even during the epic controversy that has lately consumed the country's public life...

...But he could have known, and did—as Clinton himself admitted during his own grand jury appearance in August...

...Indeed, the Conyers report argues that the president could not have committed an obstruction of justice—when he failed to correct attorney Robert Bennett's sweeping, Jones-deposition denial about Monica Lewinsky— precisely because the president was then too busy formulating an imminent perjury...

...But the White House, concerned about obstruc-tion-of-justice charges, continues to dispute exactly this point...

...Although more costly and more risky in the short run, an invasion of Iraq might actually be the safest and surest way of saving the world from Saddam...

...His impeachment now moves to trial in the Senate...

...Those inclined to sustain it first get themselves stuck in a tar of further contradiction and dishonesty...

...But now the administration's two other goals have also become impossible...

...John Conyers warned of a "coup d'etat," introducing an ominous phrase that would shortly—and endlessly—be repeated by his party colleagues...

...Last week's attack drove a stake through the heart of any American strategy that depends on agreement in the Security Council...

...That's what Saddam calls victory...

...Will we really nuke Iraq if Saddam uses chemical weapons against, say, Bahrain or Kuwait...

...this attack was both less severe and of shorter duration than the one the administration had contemplated back in November...

...and third, to create conditions in Iraq that would someday lead to Saddam's ouster by a military coup...

...Bill Clinton has become a genuinely poisonous presence in American politics...

...Robert Kagan, for the Editors...

...Quite the contrary...

...There are at least two ways to accomplish this, both of which will require a significant commitment of U.S...

...There were moments of uncommon eloquence and drama in the House debate last Friday and Saturday: Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde's opening statement...

...The damage to his forces might be significant if Saddam had to face a domestic uprising in the next few weeks or months...

...There are no sound answers to these questions...

...Another course would be to use U.S...

...attack and sympathy for Iraq were on full display last week...

...inspectors could keep the world safe from Saddam's chemical and biological weapons, that maintaining a fragile and skin-deep consensus at the Security Council could substitute for the effective but risky exercise of American military power, and, above all, that Saddam could be "contained...

...For the past year and more, American policy has rested entirely on comforting fictions: that U.N...

...inspectors—chief inspector Richard Butler's report on non-compliance last week was a virtual letter of resignation...

...and the stunning resignation announcement of speaker-designate Bob Livingston...

...second, to preserve the U.N...

...But he refuses, still, to accept responsibility for the manifest wrongs of his public life—or even to allow that those wrongs are more than a hallucination...

...inspections regime is finished...

...inspectors will be visiting Iraq again any time soon to find out...

...And even if he does use them, how credible is our deterrent...

...Security Council in support of containing Iraq, chiefly through economic sanctions...

...The Americans took their shot, and he's still around...

...This is all to the good...

...military force directly to complete the job George Bush began in 1991...

...And so on...

...military the resources to beef up their forces in the region...

...the rigorous legal arguments of Charles Canady of Florida and Christopher Cox of California...

...By the start of Friday's debate, the Democrats' substantive defense of the president had long since been reduced to a hopeless hash...

...And he and his confederates now charge those who see his wrongs clearly with something close to treason...