Bill Clinton was taken to the cleaners by Saddam Hussein last week -- to the surprise of' practically no one. But there were surprising reactions to the Clinton administration's failure to use military force against Saddam, and its decision to reward him for agreeing to inspections he was already obligated to permit.
The good news is that several members of the Senate, Democrats and Republicans, were willing to come to grips with Saddam's drive to produce weapons of mass destruction. As U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan schmoozed with Saddam in Baghdad, Democratic senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican John McCain of Arizona made a coherent case on ABC's This Week for removing Saddam rather than making concessions to him. Kerry, in particular, didn't balk even at the prospect of sending American ground troops to the Persian Gulf, if that's what it takes.
Perhaps inspired by their example, Senate majority leader Trent Lott punched holes in the Annan-Clinton-Saddam deal once it was announced. Democrat Bob Kerrey of Nebraska joined in, as did Republicans John Ashcroft of Missouri and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado. By the end of the week, key senators from both parties were talking seriously, for the first time, about a congressional role in reshaping U.S. policy toward Saddam.
Even inside the administration, voices of dissent peeped out, most notably that of U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson. Having opposed the Annan trip to Baghdad in the first place, Richardson made his lack of enthusiasm for the deal plain to anyone who talked to him privately. "Not much," he said when asked by one inquisitor what he thought of the agreement. Then, he proceeded to note the gaping loopholes in it.
On the other hand, there was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had talked tough but turned out to be the squishiest member of Clinton's team -- and who did a notably poor job of defending the deal before Congress. But Albright -- and Annan, for that matter -- were not nearly as squishy as Jack Kemp. The day the deal was struck, the 1996 Republican veep candidate told the L.A. World Affairs Council that "the entire Arab world and the entire Islamic world of 1.4 billion people may very well take [a] bombing campaign as a sure sign the United States will use its supreme power petulantly to crush anyone who refuses our dictates." As Kemp put it, the source of the conflict seemed to lie in "ill-considered" American "dictates."
These kind words for Saddam were merely the follow-on to Kemp's extraordinary venture in freelance diplomacy two weeks earlier. On Feb. 11, he met secretly in New York with Iraqi U.N. ambassador Nizar Hamdoon. Ramsey Clark-like, Kemp tried to make himself an intermediary between an enemy of the United States and the U.S. government, promoting his peace initiative to both sides. One wonders what Kemp's tough-minded colleagues at Empower America, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Bennett, think of the propriety of a private citizen's negotiating with an agent of a hostile foreign power at such a sensitive moment.