b. Military Action Against Iraq
In June of 1993, while the U.S. Quick Reaction Force and U.N. peacekeepers were bogged down in Somalia and were being subjected to armed attacks by Aidid's militia, President Clinton decided to initiate U.S. military action against Iraq, doing so without consultation with Congress or seeking its endorsement of the particular military action initiated, asserting that he was acting under the authority of various U.N. resolutions and the Persian Gulf Resolution (U.S. Public Law 102-1), the latter being the congressional joint resolution of January 14, 1991, passed by Congress on January 12, signed into law by the President on January 14 (two days before he ordered the launching of Operation Desert Storm), and still in force as American law. On Clinton's orders, U.S. air strikes, aimed at the Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad, were launched on June 26. In justifying the cruise missile attack, the Clinton Presidency cited evidence that the Iraqi Intelligence Service had instigated and fostered a conspiracy to assassinate former U.S. President George Bush during his visit to Kuwait two months earlier (April 14-16).
In April, the Kuwaiti authorities had uncovered the assassination plot, arresting 14 Iraqi and Kuwaiti nationals for planning to put a 175-pound bomb in a location where it would have exploded and killed Bush as he was being presented an award honoring him as the leader of the Persian Gulf War coalition which drove the Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait. The Kuwaiti authorities immediately informed the U.S. government of the conspiracy and arrests. Receipt of the information was quickly followed by President Clinton's ordering the FBI and CIA to conduct a thorough investigation to find out whether Saddam Hussein had authorized and sponsored the plot. The investigation uncovered convincing evidence of links between the would-be assassins and the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
President Clinton perceived the situation as a major test of his mettle as U.S. Commander- in-Chief and leader of the Western powers. He suddenly abandoned his attempts to send Hussein a conciliatory and somewhat ambiguous message--a message to the effect that he thought Hussein could redeem himself with the U.S.A. and that, if he did so, Clinton would be open to normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. On the evening of June 23, when he met with his National Security Adviser and Deputy National Security Adviser, the National Security Council members and General Colin Powell, Clinton was determined to send Hussein a different message, one which, in the words of George Stephanopoulos, the President's Senior Political Adviser, would be "an unambiguous, unapologetic message ... but with weapons, not words." [George Stephanopoulos, ALL TOO HUMAN--A POLITICAL EDUCATION (Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1999), p. 159.]
Those in attendance at the meeting, polled one at a time, unanimously recommended in favor of the President's plan for launching missile trikes against Baghdad. Scheduled for Saturday, June 26, the attack commenced at 4:22 p.m. (EDT), when cruise missiles were launched toward Baghdad from two U.S. Navy vessels positioned in the Persian Gulf--the destroyer USS Peterson and the AEGIS cruiser USS Chancellorville. Once the missiles had landed in Baghdad, President Clinton delivered from the Oval Office a public address announcing the military action he had initiated against Iraq and explaining why he had done so.