Word: butlers
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Anyone who wanted to predict the timing of the air strikes merely had to consult Richard Butler's calendar. The head of the U.N.'s Iraq inspection team, known as UNSCOM, had been telling diplomats for weeks that he intended to give the Security Council a crucial report on Iraqi compliance by Dec. 15. Delivered right on schedule, it showed that the Iraqis had been up to their usual tricks: concealing equipment that could be used to make bioweapons, blocking interviews with workers at suspicious sites, lying about sealed documents detailing the military's past uses of chemical agents...
...last minute, when Saddam promised full cooperation with UNSCOM. At the time, Clinton declared that war would come without warning if Saddam misbehaved again. Months of Iraqi duplicity had convinced the White House that UNSCOM wouldn't get compliance. So when he got advance word on the contents of Butler's report on Sunday, Dec. 13, the President, in Jerusalem at the beginning of his Middle East trip, had no good choice but to act. He gave the Pentagon 72 hours to prepare an attack. Says a senior White House official: "The consequences, the damage, the significance of making...
...Tuesday afternoon, when Butler's report landed in the hands of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the members of the Security Council, the U.S. had begun to accelerate, though quietly, toward war. On the way back from the Middle East on Air Force One on Tuesday morning, Clinton, flanked by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, called his military advisers and Vice President Al Gore to discuss the Butler report. The group agreed air strikes were the right response. Clinton then got assurances of British participation from Prime Minister Tony Blair...
...bombing was a particularly cruel blow to Annan, who had brokered deal after deal to ward off military action. "This is a sad day for me personally," he said. "What has happened cannot be reversed." In an address to the nation, Clinton claimed he had to strike while the Butler report was hot and because "to initiate military action during Ramadan [coming up over the weekend] would be profoundly offensive to the Muslim world." But even within the American military, there were private grumblings about the campaign's awkward timing. "Saddam has been kicking Bill Clinton in the teeth...
...group of foreign policy advisers that included National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Defense Secretary William Cohen, CIA Director George Tenet and General Henry Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the call, discussion focused first on the report that would be delivered later that day by Richard Butler, chairman of UNSCOM, the U.N. special commission that oversees weapons inspections in Iraq. In scathing terms, Butler would say that the "full cooperation" that Saddam had promised on Nov. 15, in the face of an earlier military buildup against him, had turned out to be a sham...