HR CLINTON TOLD UNTRUTH ABOUT 1998 BOMBING

NORMAN SOLOMON, INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY - If facts matter, then it should matter that Hillary Clinton chose to rely on such a basic falsehood during the debate when she flatly stated: 'We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors.' In fact, just prior to the Clinton administration's several days of bombing Iraq in December 1998, the U.N.'s UNSCOM weapons inspectors left Iraq when UNSCOM head Richard Butler withdrew them -- because the Clinton administration made it clear that the U.S. government was about to start bombing."

That false statement by Hillary Clinton during the debate Thursday evening came as she was trying to verbally navigate what were her most difficult moments of the night: about her vote for the October 2002 congressional resolution that authorized an invasion of Iraq. At that point in the debate, she was arguing that she had made what she called a 'reasoned judgment' which assumed that Saddam Hussein had a record of blocking inspectors so they couldn't find his weapons of mass destruction. In the process, her extreme distortion of history -- asserting that the four-year absence of U.N. inspectors from Iraq was because Saddam 'threw out inspectors' in December 1998 -- goes to the core of her candor about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and her rationale for voting to authorize it.

Any journalists interested in fact-checking Senator Clinton's claim that 'We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors' would be well-advised to stick to relying on the original reportage of what occurred in December 1998. Since then, a self-referential myth has developed in retrospective news coverage of those events, with journalists and politicians alike frequently recycling the false assertion that the four-year absence of U.N. inspectors from Iraq began when Saddam kicked them out of the country." More Information