Clinton Manufactured Iraq Crisis, Violated Constitution
Rep. Ron Paul calls on President Clinton to resign
WASHINGTON, DC
-- President Clinton, in launching the
massive Dec. 16 attack on Iraq, used a manufactured
crisis to deceive
the American people, and to bypass
Congress' power to declare war.
Warplanes aboard
the USS Enterprise, combined with more than 200 cruise missiles from eight
Navy warships,
converged on
Iraqi targets at 5:06 p.m. EST (1:06 a.m.Baghdad time). Over a four-day
period, reports U.S.
Marine Gen.
Anthony Zinni, who oversaw the Iraq attack, 300 strike fighters, bombers
and support aircraft flew
600 sorties,
more than half of them at night. Another 40 ships took part in the attack,
with 10 of them firing
cruise missiles.
More than 600 bombs were dropped, 90 cruise missiles fired from the air
and another 300 from
ships at sea.
The UNSCOM report
Mr. Clinton used as cause for war, says syndicated columnist Robert D.
Novak (Wag the
Congress, The
Washington Post, Dec. 21), contains six complaints cited by Richard Butler,
executive chairman
of UNSCOM. These
complaints "reflect Saddam Hussein's obnoxious style but do not compare
to more than 400
unimpeded inspections
reported by Iraq since cooperation resumed Nov.14."
Mr. Novak provides
an example of the type of incidents Mr. Clinton used to justify the attack
on Iraq. "On Dec.
9 weapons inspectors
from UNSCOM, acting on a tip, showed up without notification at the Baghdad
headquarters
of the ruling Baath Party to search for ballistic missile components. The
Iraqi escorts, citing
a 1996 agreement,
said only four inspectors could enter."
The Butler report itself was a setup.
According to
Rowan Scarborough (Did White House orchestrate a crisis? The Washington
Times, Dec. 18)
Scott Ritter,
a former U.N. inspector, said Mr. Butler conferred with the Clinton administration's
national
security staff
on how to write his report of noncompliance before submitting it to the
U.N. Security
Council. The
former inspector said the White House wanted to ensure the report contained
sufficiently tough
language on
which to justify its decision to bomb Iraq."I'm telling you this was a
preordained conclusion. This
inspection was
a total setup by the United States," said Ritter. Mr. Ritter resigned from
UNSCOM in August,
accusing the
Clinton administration of interfering in how and when inspections were
carried out.
The decision to attack Iraq was made before the Bultler report was submitted to the U.N. Security Council.
Reports the MacLaughlin
Group (NBC, Dec. 18), that while the president told the nation Wednesday
night that the
attack was triggered
by this Butler report, the "time line into the bombing itself shows that
the president
ordered airstrikes
48 hours before he saw the report."
Mr. Clinton's
reference to Iraq's nuclear weapons was completely at odds with the report
of the agency charged
with reporting
on Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons capabilities.
Says the MacLaughlin
Group, there is another report that was filed with the UNSCOM report: the
International
Atomic Energy
Agency report. The IAEA worked hand in glove with UNSCOM. The agency is
charged with
determining
any Iraqi clandestine nuclear weapons capabilities. This week the IAEA
filed a companion
separate report,
accompanying the UNSCOM report, that went largely unnoticed. In it, the
IAEA gives Iraq a
clean nuclear
bill of health, describing Iraq's level of cooperation as, "efficient and
effective," reported the
McLauglin Group.
President Clinton
told another lie, says Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of history at Boston
University, and
author of the
best-seeling "A People's History of the United Sates."
Mr. Clinton said
that other nations besides Iraq have weapons of mass destruction, but Iraq
alone has used
them. Says Prof.
Zinn, "He could only say this to a population deprived of history. The
United States has
supplied Turkey,
Israel, and Indonesia with such weapons and they have used them against
civilian populations.
But the nation
most guilty is our own. No nation in the world possesses greater weapons
of mass destruction than
we do, and none
has used them more often, or with greater loss of civilian life. In Hiroshima
hundreds of
thousands died,
in Korea and Vietnam millions died as a result of our use of such
weapons."
Mr. Zinn's words
echo those of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. cited by former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark,
in a Dec. 20
letter sent to each member of the Security council. Said Rev. King, "The
greatest purveyor of
violence on
earth is my own government."
Presidential
candidate Patrick J. Buchanan (Failed President, Flawed Policy, Dec. 18)
says, "It is time to
ask how grave
a threat Iraq is to America. In the Gulf War, Iraq did not attack us; we
attacked Iraq. We
launched the
'round-the-clock air strikes with 2,000 planes for six weeks; Iraq fired
back a handful of
Scuds. Iraq
killed scores of Americans; we killed thousands of Iraqis. Yes, Saddam
makes "war on his own
people," but
who inflicts the greater suffering --Saddam or a U.S.-led embargo that
has claimed the lives
of 239,000 children,
5 years old and under, since 1990?"
Matthew Rothschild,
Editor of the Progressive Magazine, writes (An Attack That Makes No Sense,
Los Angeles
Times, Dec.
17, 1998) , "The U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq is an act of war not
sanctioned by
international
law or by the U.S. Constitution. Within 72 hours of his grand jury
appearance in August, Clinton
bombed Sudan
and Afghanistan. Now, the day before he faced impeachment, he attacks Baghdad
and other
locations in
Iraq. Our founders gave Congress the sole power to declare war. Congress
has not issued such a
declaration
in this instance. According to international law, a country can take unilateral
action against
another country
only for the purpose of self-defense. But this bombing attack can hardly
be called an act of
self-defense.
Saddam has not attacked the United States and does not pose an imminent
threat to us."
At least one
congressman has dared to speak out against Mr. Clinton's attack on Iraq,
and his usurpation of
Congress' power.
Last Wednesday,
Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) called on President Clinton to resign for the good
of the country and the
safety of American
soldiers. "Once again President Clinton is using American troops to deflect
attention
from his record
of lies, distortions, obstruction of justice and abuse of power. Just a
couple months ago,
the president
launched an attack against the nation of Sudan in an attempt to cover over
his personal problems;
an attack which
we know now had no basis whatsoever in protecting US interests."
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