Democrats for Regime Change
HAYES, STEPHEN F.
Democrats for Regime Change The president has some surprising allies. BY STEPHEN F. HAYES THE PRESIDENT mulls a strike against Iraq, which he calls an "outlaw nation" in league with an "unholy...
...Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will...
...When UNSCOM would then uncover evidence that gave the lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend the reports...
...Later, we stepped up our enforcement of the no-fly zones...
...left in its possession after the Gulf War...
...Clinton was on a roll: Now listen to this: What did it admit...
...There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein...
...Matters looked different in 1998, when Democrats were working with a president of their own party...
...Of course, much has changed since President Clinton gave that speech...
...inspectors permission to inspect—and Saddam won again...
...John Kerry was equally hawkish: "If there is not unfettered, unrestricted, unlimited access per the U.N...
...We simply cannot allow that to happen...
...Daschle said the 1998 resolution would "send as clear a message as possible that we are going to force, one way or another, diplomatically or militarily, Iraq to comply with international law...
...Summing up the Clinton administration's argument, Daschle said, "'Look, we have exhausted virtually our diplomatic effort to get the Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law...
...Next, throughout this entire process, Iraqi agents have undermined and undercut UNSCOM...
...resolution for inspections, and UNSCOM cannot in our judgment appropriately perform its functions, then we obviously reserve the rights to press that case internationally and to do what we need to do as a nation in order to be able to enforce those rights," Kerry said back on February 23, 1998...
...Considering the views these Democrats expressed four years ago, why the current reluctance to support President Bush...
...Who knows...
...troops and equipment in the Persian Gulf...
...Daschle asked last Wednesday after meeting with President Bush...
...The talk among world leaders, however, focuses on diplomacy...
...And it won applause from leading Democrats on Capitol Hill...
...They've harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors of suspect facilities as inspectors walked through the front door...
...inspectors were still inside Iraq, it stands to reason that in the absence of those inspectors monitoring his weapons build-up, Saddam is an even greater threat today...
...The Saudis balk at giving us overflight rights...
...What more needs to be said...
...Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal...
...But if the president continues to run into stronger-than-expected resistance from Democrats on Capitol Hill, he can always just recycle the arguments so many Democrats accepted in 1998: "Just consider the facts," Bill Clinton urged...
...France, Russia, China, and most Arab nations oppose military action...
...Now that the Bush administration has begun to do so, many of these same Democrats are rushing to erect additional obstacles...
...These are the words not of president George W. Bush in September Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The televised speech followed a month-long build-up of U.S...
...He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction...
...BY STEPHEN F. HAYES THE PRESIDENT mulls a strike against Iraq, which he calls an "outlaw nation" in league with an "unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals...
...weapons inspectors out of Iraq for good...
...But not, apparently, if you're Tom Daschle...
...This is the key question...
...If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow...
...25 biological-filled Scud warheads...
...2002 but of President Bill Clinton on February 18, 1998...
...The answer is we don't have another option...
...Then we bombed a little...
...The situation has gotten worse...
...What has changed in recent months or years" to justify confronting Saddam...
...Clinton was speaking at the Pentagon, after the Joint Chiefs and other top national security advisers had briefed him on U.S...
...created a new, toothless inspection regime...
...And the answer is we don't have another option...
...Bob Graham says the administration hasn't presented anything new...
...We have got to force them to comply, and we are doing so militarily...
...2,000 gallons of anthrax...
...That is a threat to the stability of the Middle East...
...The new inspectors inspected nothing...
...Administration rhetoric could hardly be stronger...
...Ten months after Saddam accepted Annan's offer, he kicked U.N...
...In 1995, Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, and chief organizer of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program, defected to Jordan...
...Other current critics of President Bush—including Kerry, Graham, Patrick Leahy, Christopher Dodd, and Republican Chuck Hagel—co-sponsored the broad 1998 resolution: Congress "urges the president to take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs...
...The president asks the nation to consider this question: What if Saddam Hussein fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop his program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made...
...The president's warnings are firm...
...We have got to force them to comply, and we are doing so militarily...
...It is a threat with respect to the potential of terrorist activities on a global basis...
...Previously, it had vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth...
...A year after the inspectors were banished, the U.N...
...Dick Gephardt wants to know what a democratic Iraq would look like...
...John Kerry complains about, well, everything...
...Emphasis added...
...and 157 aerial bombs...
...It admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability—notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism...
...If Saddam Hussein was a major threat in February 1998, when President Clinton prepared this country for war and U.N...
...It is a threat even to regions near but not exactly in the Middle East...
...They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them...
...The Senate majority leader and his fellow congressional Democrats have spent months criticizing the Bush administration for its failure to make the "public case" for military intervention in Iraq...
...For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times within just 14 months and it has submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM...
...And might I say, UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production...
...Dianne Feinstein wants the Israeli-Palestinian conflict settled first...
...military readiness...
...We complained...
...Then we stopped bombing...
...The stakes, he says, could not be higher...
...But just five days later, Kofi Annan struck yet another "deal" with the Iraqi dictator—which once more gave U.N...
...Saddam Hussein has already used these weapons and has made it clear that he has the intent to continue to try, by virtue of his duplicity and secrecy, to continue to do so...
...More Clinton: "We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century," he argued...
...Daschle not only supported military action against Iraq, he campaigned vigorously for a congressional resolution to formalize his support...
...resolutions he agreed to at the end of the Gulf War...
...He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more...
...Given that, what other option is there but to force them to do so...
...And he vigorously defended President Clinton's inclination to use military force in Iraq...
...Given that, what other option is there but to force them to do so?' That's what they're saying...
...And our people were there observing it and had the pictures to prove it...
...Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had Daschle: "Look, we have exhausted . . . our diplomatic effort to get the Iraqis to comply with their own agreements and with international law...
...secretary general Kofi Annan prepares a last-ditch attempt to convince Saddam Hussein to abide by the U.N...
...Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of weapons in significant quantities and weapon stocks...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 1
