Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...weapons inspections have obviously damaged him much more since the Gulf War than the occasional pinpricks he has absorbed from U.S. cruise missiles. For six years Saddam and his officials have lied, threatened and concealed everything they could to keep the U.N. Special Commission from finding and destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical and biological. He still has some of them stashed away, but the inspectors were burrowing ever closer to the last, most secret hiding places, and it looked as if they would never give up. Hence Saddam's decision to risk bombs...
...spokesmen like to say they have Saddam "in a box," but this time he had Bill Clinton on the spot. If Iraq kept the inspectors from doing their jobs, how would the U.N. respond? Among the veto-holding members of the Security Council, Russia and France opposed using any more military force on Iraq, and Russia was reluctant to tighten economic sanctions. If the Security Council did not act against Saddam, the U.S. could attack by itself, blasting Iraq with cruise missiles again to avoid getting pilots killed or captured. But that kind of attack could turn...
...After the smooth-talking Tariq Aziz threatened to shoot down U-2s Monday, Clinton opted for restraint by waiting to see if the U.N. Security Council would condemn Saddam. They did. Iraq responded with an angry expulsion of American inspectors that only brought the U.S. and U.N. closer together...
...feel even better if Clinton decided to bomb him now. Short of standing in the streets of Baghdad screaming ?come and get me? at passing U-2s, he couldn?t be signaling it any clearer. The reason? It will fracture the international alliance and build sympathy for Iraq in the Arab world. Nothing would give Saddam greater pleasure than to play the butterfly broken on America?s wheel...
...Asked whether Iraq would initiate hostilities by firing on a U-2 spy plane when flights resume Saturday, he was more subtle: "We cannot allow the U-2 to come and take pictures of areas that America might want to attack...