In a speech in Sacramento, California, President Bill Clinton portrays a bleak future if nations do not cooperate against “organized forces of destruction,” telling the audience that only a small amount of “nuclear cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did.” Stopping the spread of nuclear materials and not letting weapons “fall into the wrong hands” is “fundamentally what is stake in the stand-off we’re having in Iraq today,” he says.

Clinton asked Americans not to view the current crisis as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, “think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.”

It is a good reminder that the WMD phantom—with Iraq, North Korea, Iran, etc.—is perpetual and also, short of destroying Iraq and war, we are so unable to peacefully resolve the bigger question of proliferation in the most difficult cases.

 

Saddam Hussein revokes his August 5 decision to cease cooperation with the United Nations inspectors (UNSCOM). Iraq states in a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan that it is willing to resume inspections. But the U.S. and U.K. argue that the country imposes a number of unacceptable conditions with its offer, particularly restrictions on visiting presidential sites and including American inspectors. Capitulating, Iraq then informs the U.N. Security Council that it was the “clear and unconditional decision of the Iraqi government to resume cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA.”

As Iraq deliberates on resumption of inspections, an air and cruise missile operation (Desert Viper) is being prepared and even implemented: aircraft moving into place, armed, with targets selected. When Iraq notifies the Security Council, President Clinton aborts Desert Viper just minutes before the designated H-hour (11:00 AM EST).

In a televised address, President Clinton later says that Iraq has “backed down” and pledged full cooperation with UNSCOM. The president also makes clear that U.S. policy includes the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a prerequisite for resumption of normal relations. The UNSC accepts Iraq’s decision and issues a statement in which it stresses that Iraq’s commitment “needs to be established by unconditional and sustained cooperation with the Special Commission and the IAEA in exercising the full range of their activities provided for in their mandates.”

The U.S. and U.K. then threaten that without full cooperation, they will strike Iraq without warning. According to the Iraq Survey Group, the events of 1998 “had so poisoned the atmosphere with UNSCOM that the relationship could not be repaired.” It was the end of inspections and the beginning of the road to certain war, but also not the last time that a president stopped an underway bombing operation, President Trump doing so vis-à-vis Iran.

 

Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda lieutenants are indicted in the Southern District of New York.

The unsealed indictment, resulting from the African embassy bombings, included bin Laden; al Qaeda operational chief Mohammed Atef; Wadih El Hage, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed (also known as Harun Fazul); Mohamed Sadiq Odeh; and Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali. Both bin Laden and Atef are added to the Department of State Rewards Program.

The indictment also charged that al Qaeda had allied itself with Sudan, Iran, and Hizballah. The original sealed indictment, according to the 9/11 Commission (p. 128) had added that al Qaeda had “reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.” Interestingly, this language about al Qaeda’s “understanding” with Iraq was dropped from the final indictment filed in November 1998.

Upon the indictment, a threat advisory was sent by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) headquarters to all immigration inspectors at ports of entry. It warned of possible infiltration into the United States by radical Islamic fundamentalists sympathetic to bin Laden. It calls for “hard” inspections of certain visitors from Middle Eastern countries. It seems to have no effect whatsoever.

CIA director George Tenet would later write: “I can’t imagine this fazed him in the least since he was living comfortably in his Afghan sanctuary.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 109)