Word: actioner
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Iraq's perpetually menacing dictator. As Clinton told the world that he had aborted the launch of hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles, his Iraq policy seemed to wear a stern new look. Was this goodbye containment, hello replacement? Not exactly. Clinton made it clear the reason for aborting military action last week was to preserve unfettered inspection of Iraq's arsenal, the one semi-working mechanism for keeping Saddam's nasty ambitions in check. So he's trying containment plus replacement: remove Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and remove Saddam. If one doesn't work, maybe the other will...
...reach it. Republicans grew fed up with Clinton's halfhearted, clandestine efforts, and key Democrats demanded direct talk about encouraging democratic change, while the White House and the CIA, spooked by past failures, stalled over new ideas. Around June, the White House finally delivered a top-secret covert-action memo to Congress, but it smelled like a rehash of tired, old schemes, and the Senate Intelligence Committee bounced it. Instead, it backed the $97 million Iraq Liberation Act, an ambitious bill designed to bring support for anti-Saddam dissidents out of the closet and funnel money and guns to them...
...devise a plan for uniting the disparate dissidents into a credible political force, "raising their profile" under the guidance of a senior official. (Before Sunday, no one was willing to take the assignment.) In coming months, the CIA will return to the drawing board to dream up another covert-action plan involving clandestine funds, recruitment among disgruntled military officers and stepped-up propaganda. But White House officials concede that "there's no magic pill there. You just don't run in and throw some secret things at Saddam...
Clinton's latest moves at least have the virtue of making the U.S. appear busy: pressing aggressive inspections, organizing a political opposition, plotting covert action, "preparing the battlefield" for insurrection. But the results are all too likely to prove insignificant when it turns out you can't cheaply subcontract a coup or ever track down 100% of Saddam's terror arsenal...
During a hearing in the lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court in Dayton, the company's lawyer explained it this way: "Every action [Hobart] has taken is motivated by sound economic or operational rationale...