| He took the position that a vote for impeachment was simply a vote to send the Starr report on to the Senate, which could determine whether the report was factually accurate and whether my removal from office was warranted
A bipartisan group of prosecutors told the committee that no normal prosecutor would charge me with perjury on the evidence in this case, and a panel of distinguished historians, including Arthur Schlesinger of City University of New York, CVann Woodward of Yale, and Sean Wilentz of Princeton, said that what I was alleged to have done did not meet the framers standard of impeachmentthat is, a high crime or misdemeanor committed in the exercise of executive powerThis had long been the accepted understanding, and their interpretation was backed up by an open letter to Congress signed by four hundred historiansFor example, in the Watergate case, the House Judiciary Committee voted against impeaching President Nixon for alleged income tax evasion because it had nothing to do with his performance in officeBut all this was entirely irrelevant to Hyde, to his equally hostile counsel, David Schippers, and to the right-wingers who controlled the House
Ever since the election, Tom DeLay and his staff had been firing up the right-wing networks to demand my impeachmentThe radio talk shows were pushing it hard, and moderates were beginning to hear from anti-Clinton activists in their home districtsThey were convinced they could get enough vintage cartier watch moderate members of Congress to forget about the popular opposition to impeachment by making them fear the retaliation of disappointed Clinton haters
In the context of this strategy, the Hyde committees vote against a censure resolution was as important as its votes for the impeachment articlesCensure was the preferred option of 75 percent of the American people; if a censure motion were to be presented to the House, the moderate Republicans would vote for it and impeachment would be deadHyde claimed that Congress didnt have the authority to censure the President; it was impeachment or nothingIn fact, Presidents Andrew Jackson and James Polk had both been censured by CongressThe censure resolution was voted down by the committee, again on a partisan voteThe full House would not be able to vote on what most Americans wantedNow it was just a question of how many moderate Republicans could be persuaded
After the committee vote, Hillary and I flew to the Middle EastWe had a meeting and dinner with Prime Minister Netanyahu, lit candles on a menorah for Hanukkah, and visited Rabins grave with his familyThe next day Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Dennis Ross, Hillary, and I helicoptered into densely populated Gaza to cut the ribbon on the new airport and have lunch with Arafat in a hotel overlooking Gazas long, beautiful Mediterranean beachAnd I gave the speech to the Palestinian National Council that I had pledged to deliver at Wye RiverJust before I tiffany co earrings got up to speak, almost all the delegates raised their hands in support of removing the provision calling for the destruction of Israel from their charterIt was the moment that made the whole trip worthwhileYou could almost hear the sighs of relief in Israel; perhaps Israelis and Palestinians actually could share the land and the future after allI thanked the delegates, told them I wanted their people to have concrete benefits from peace, and asked them to stay with the peace process
It wasnt an idle pleaLess than two months after the triumph at Wye River, the negotiations were in trouble againEven though Netanyahus cabinet had narrowly approved the agreement, his coalition didnt really favor it, making it virtually impossible for him to proceed with troop redeployment and prisoner releases, or to move on to the even more difficult final status issues, including the question of Palestinian statehood and whether the eastern section of Jerusalem would become the capital of PalestineThe previous days amendment of the Palestinian charter helped Netanyahu with the Israeli public, but his own coalition was a much harder crew to convinceIt looked as if he would either have to form a more broad-based government of national unity or call elections
On the morning after my speech to the Palestinians, Netanyahu, Arafat, and I met at the Erez border crossing to try to energize the implementation of Wye River and decide how to move to the final status omega constellation lady watch issuesAfterward, Arafat took Hillary and me to BethlehemHe was proud to have custody of a site so holy to Christians, and he knew it would mean a lot to us to visit it close to Christmas
After we left Arafat, we joined Prime Minister Netanyahu for a visit to MasadaI was impressed that so much work had been done since Hillary and I had first been there in 1981 to recover the remains of the fortress where Jewish martyrs had fought to the death for their convictionsBibi seemed somewhat pensive and subduedHe had gone beyond his political safety zone at Wye River, and his future was uncertainThere was no way to know whether the chances he had taken would bring Israel closer to lasting peace or bring an end to his government
We bid the prime minister farewell and flew home to another conflictSix days earlier, on just the second day of renewed UN inspections in Iraq, some inspectors had been denied access to Saddams Baath Party headquartersOn the day we returned to Washington, the chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler, reported to Kofi Annan that Iraq had not kept its commitments to cooperate with him and had even imposed new restrictions on the inspectors work
The next day the United States and the United Kingdom launched a series of attacks from airplanes and with cruise missiles on Iraqs suspected chemical, biological, and nuclear lab sites and its military capacity to threaten its neighborsIn my address to the American people that evening, I noted that dolce and gabbana handbag Saddam had previously used chemical weapons on Iranians and Kurds in northern Iraq and had fired Scud missiles at other countriesI said I had called off an attack four weeks earlier because Saddam had promised full complianceInstead, the inspectors had repeatedly been threatened, so Iraq has abused its final chance
At the time the strikes were launched, our intelligence indicated that substantial amounts of biological and chemical materials that had been in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War as well as some missile warheads were still unaccounted for, and that some elementary laboratory work toward acquiring a nuclear weapon was being doneOur military experts felt that unconventional weapons might have become even more important to Saddam because his conventional military forces were much weaker than they had been before the Gulf War
My national security team was unanimous in the belief that we should hit Saddam as soon as the Butler report was issued, to minimize the chances that Iraq could disperse its forces and protect its biological and chemical stocksTony Blair and his advisors agreedThe Anglo-American assault lasted four days, with 650 air sorties and 400 cruise missiles, all carefully targeted to hit military and national security targets and to minimize civilian casualtiesAfter the attack we had no way to know how much of the proscribed material had been destroyed, but Iraqs ability to produce and deploy dangerous weapons had plainly been chanel j10 watch knock off reduced |
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