Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [409]
Moderate Republicans looking for an out latched onto the theme that voting to impeach was not “really throwing the President out of office;" it was just “moving [the matter] on to the Senate” for a decision. “And so, you know, a lot of them folded like Dick’s hatband,” President Clinton would later say of the moderate Republicans who turned on him. “And they wanted to look like they did it on principle so they said, ‘Well, [the president] wasn’t contrite enough.’”
Representative Barney Frank, watching from the Democratic sidelines, would posit that “true believer right-wing fundamentalists” like Tom DeLay had stepped into a “vacuum” in Republican leadership and had seized control. As Frank watched the march toward an impeachment vote, these “true believers” were in control: “Their view was that Bill and Hillary Clinton were two kinds of wizards that sort of bewitched America. And they really believed that if they could get rid of the Clintons and their sort of magical powers, they’d have their country back. So to them this was not an impeachment. They wanted to drive a stake through the Clintons’ hearts. This was an exorcism.”
JUST as the full House of Representatives prepared to take a final vote, all hell broke loose in the Middle East. President Clinton was checking out of a hotel in Jerusalem on December 15, having met with Palestinian and Israeli leaders on a four-day peace mission, when political advisers informed him that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was again defying the U.N. weapons inspectors, refusing to permit them to search suspected facilities for “weapons of mass destruction.” Despite repeated promises to comply, the Iraqi dictator was thumbing his nose at the United States and the United Nations. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—who accompanied the president back to Washington on Air Force One—warned that if a military strike was not executed within forty-eight hours, the United States would put itself at risk and endanger security around the globe.
His eyes puffy from stress and exhaustion, made worse by allergies that some mornings caused him to remain hidden from view in the White House residence, Clinton received a final briefing early on the 16th. National Security Council advisers recommended an immediate attack aimed at Saddam’s elite Republican Guard to catch the Iraqi dictator off guard. Yet there was a delicate matter of timing, recalled Clinton aide Doug Sosnik: “If you looked at the calendar and looked at the clock, the Ramadan [the Islamic holy month of fasting and prayer that commenced with the new moon] and the climate, the weather and other issues … we didn’t have a lot of good choices.” The window of opportunity for a military strike was narrowing by the hour.
The “cloud of impeachment,” those surrounding President Clinton observed, was placing staggering pressures on the commander in chief at this moment in his presidency. The president’s national security advisers understood that their decision to strike at Iraq had nothing to do with the impeachment situation. But they also knew that Republican flamethrowers would soon be shrieking, “Wag the Dog!”
By 8:00 in the morning, nearly a dozen U.S. Navy warships, joined by British forces, moved into position to launch missile sorties and bombing raids on nearly a hundred targets in Iraq. As soon as the news of Operation Desert Fox became public, Republican leaders in Congress went ballistic. Senator Trent Lott, Majority Leader from Mississippi, stated angrily into a bank of microphones: “I cannot support this military action in the Persian Gulf at this time.” The Republican leader declared, “Both the timing and the policy are subject to question.” Representative Gerald Solomon of New York, a staunch conservative who openly despised Bill Clinton, lashed out: “It’s obvious they’re doing everything they can to postpone the vote on this impeachment in order to try to get any kind of leverage they can, and the American