03/02/08 "ICH" -- -- In Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton lied again about Iraq.
At the forum in Los Angeles, Hillary Clinton declared, “We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors.”
That statement was totally false. The bombing campaign had been planned for months and the inspectors were not thrown out. They were ordered out by President Bill Clinton in anticipation of the four-day U.S.-led bombing campaign.
The chronology, which is on the public record, is as follows:
In early 1998, the Clinton Administration began to raise concerns about Iraq’s refusal to allow inspectors of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) to visit so-called “presidential sites,” a liberally-defined series of buildings and grounds across the country that Iraq claimed were used by government officials. Even though subsequent evidence has revealed that the Iraqis had nothing to hide, since all proscribed weapons and weapons material had long since been eliminated, Saddam Hussein held firm. Given that a number of prominent American political leaders from both parties had called openly for assassinating him, however, the Iraqi leader’s reluctance to allow Americans into presidential palaces may have been a result of concerns that such access would make him and other top officials personally vulnerable. Furthermore, the Iraqis had complained that, despite a stated policy of avoiding staffing UNSCOM with experts from “intelligence providing states,” there was a disproportionate number of Americans involved in the inspections, who would deliberately prolong the process and could potentially provide information to the U.S. military. The Iraqi dictator also reportedly had an obsessive compulsive disorder which led him to order that his palaces be kept meticulously clean and made him particularly reluctant to allow large groups of foreigners to move about his homes.
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