Word: striking
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After Cheney's return, the Administration's incoherence on Iraq began to spill out. Officials started free-lancing. Exiled Iraqi opposition leaders, convinced that war was imminent, began lobbying for favors. Campaigning for congressional Republicans, Cheney started to test the waters for a pre-emptive strike to "remove serious threats to our country before they materialize." (He never mentioned Iraq by name, but everyone knew what he meant.) Republican congressional leaders, facing an election, fretted that the disarray would hurt them politically. At one point that spring, a senior White House official said in exasperation, "The dirty little secret...
...days later, on Martin Luther King Day, Powell--at de Villepin's request--attended a Security Council session that was to debate terrorism. The meeting was relatively uneventful, though Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister, said a military strike against Iraq would make fighting terrorism more difficult. But at the press conference afterward, de Villepin dropped his bomb. France, he said, thought that "nothing justifies envisaging military action." It was the plainest signal possible that so long as the inspectors were getting cooperation from Saddam, Paris would not support...
...inside. A senior U.S. official told TIME that the CIA received an intelligence report that one of Saddam's sons was either killed or seriously injured; a second intelligence report cited sources who saw Saddam carried out of the rubble on a stretcher. In the wake of the U.S. strike, Iraqi television broadcast what it claimed was a live statement from Saddam that purported to show he had survived. Some viewers wondered whether the haggard, bespectacled figure was actually the dictator or one of his body doubles, though intelligence experts concluded that it was probably Saddam. Still, that...
...during the campaign, he was asked what he would do if Saddam tested him. "That would be good," said Bush. "I've learned one thing; I'd jump on him." But despite the aggressive language, there was no sign that he had accepted the logic of a pre-emptive strike against Saddam. After Sept. 11, he initially resisted making Iraq an early target of American might. Wolfowitz, says a Republican lawmaker, "was like a parrot bringing [Iraq] up all the time. It was getting on the President's nerves." At one point in the Camp David meeting after Sept...
...plan was pre-empted because of an intelligence bonanza that could have delivered the knockout punch before the opening bell. Acting on fresh information that came in hours before the deadline the U.S. President had set for Saddam to give up power, George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to strike the Baghdad bunker where Saddam was believed to be sleeping. Just before dawn Thursday, three dozen Tomahawk missiles outfitted with 1,000-lb. warheads were unleashed from six warships in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea and slammed into three buildings in Baghdad. "The intelligence indicated there would be senior...