This is not 1998. Five years is a long time and anything could have happened to the weapons since then. Clinton did not declare war while inspections were going on and showing results. He did not invade or occupy Iraq. What he did do is strike suspected weapon sites he felt or was told were a threat. Bush could have done the same and we wouldn't be having this conversation. We now see how bad the intelligence really was and still is and may very well  question whether Clinton had good intelligence for what he did. But that doesn't change anything for Bush.

Anyone that can't see the difference between targeted strikes on alleged weapons facilities compared to invasion and occupation (over global protests and objections) than there is no point in trying to keep explaining it. We might as well be comparing apples and oranges.

As has been mentioned repeatedly before, the difference in the scope of the campaigns is irrelevent to our disscusion to the justification behind mounting any military attack at all. Trying to invalidate the debate that way doesn't even confront the issue. 

If you believe Bush lied, do you believe that Clinton lied? (no, I mean about the weapons!)

The only other point I have to make is how do you know Clinton's strikes did not destroy the WMD's Bush is now looking for?

No one seems to know where these weapons were after 1998 but Bush and his administration swore that not only were they still there but Saddam was stockpiling even more.

Where is the evidence for that?

Dr Buckley(a senior official at Britain's Ministry of Defence) said that the targets did not include sites where chemical and biological weapons were being held - only the systems which would have been used to deliver them - because of fears that the chemicals might be released.

How is this for proof:  -- Iraqi scientist turns over centrifuge, needed to develop nuclear bomb,  that had been hidden in Baghdad.
Watch CNN.

    There you go, have a nice day.

    Like i said earlier nothing is going to jump into your open arms and say here i am

Bush needs to find them and account for them or prove they were destroyed...

OPERATION DESERT FOX lasted only 70 hours but it involved 250 raids by Allied aircraft and 425 cruise missiles, almost double the total used in the 45-day Desert Storm campaign of the 1991 Gulf war.

All missions were flown at night to protect the aircrew and to reduce the chance of civilian casualties. No Allied personnel were injured although Iraqi doctors report scores of civilians killed and hundreds wounded...the professional Republican Guard, the well-equipped core of the Iraqi forces that Saddam Hussein uses to crush opposition in Iraq, was attacked. One RAF bombing raid hit the headquarters of an armoured brigade from the Republican Guard, destroying equipment that would be used to control the brigade's 100 or so tanks.

Clinton did not declare war while inspections were going on and showing results. He did not invade or occupy Iraq. What he did do is strike suspected weapon sites he felt or was told were a threat.

It has been discussed in this forum that Clinton did engage (with Britain under Tony Blair) in bombing a country which had not attacked us. Innocent civilians were killed. His reasoning was that that Iraq's WMD were a "clear and present" danger to our saftey as Americans. Was this justified?

Clearly that wasn't all that was targeted and finally it was attempt to remind everyone of the topic of this thread, speaking of which the facts remain.

That being the case why don't we put Clinton on trial yet again...he can be Bush's co-defendant.

People, let me appeal to a side of you that I can tell from your postings everyone has. Your reasoning side. If Saddam did not have WMD, why didn't he just give the inspectors cart blanch in his country? Up into the war not even Hans Blix and El Baradei said he was complying. He certainly didn't think the US was kidding. Everyone in the Arab world had already told him Bush was a cowboy and ready to go.

If Saddam did not have WMD, why didn't he just give the inspectors cart blanch in his country?

Something tells me you've never directly dealt with a government organization.

I hope history sees this current debacle for what it is.

At around 2 p.m. Tuesday, as chief United Nations arms inspector Richard Butler labored with a fountain pen over his report on Iraq, White House Chief of Staff John Podesta was informing congressional leaders that U.S. forces would launch an attack on Iraq the following day.

Almost four more hours would pass before Butler finished drafting his finding of Iraqi obstruction and walked the first copy up to the 38th floor of U.N. headquarters in New York for Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Yet, aboard Air Force One, en route back from the Mideast, President Clinton had already ordered the attacks on Iraq that would be dubbed Operation Desert Fox.

Because Butler's report is described as the trigger for the American and British air campaign underway since Wednesday night, that juxtaposition has brought fierce attack on the chief of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM). Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Sergey Lavrov, backed by China and some of Annan's senior advisers, has leveled accusations that Butler drafted his stark conclusions to serve Washington's war aims...
Among the circumstances cited by those who suspect Butler of coordinating with Washington on a rationale for war, three stand out:

-- Butler made four visits to the U.S. mission to the U.N. on Monday, the day before finishing his report.

-- Clinton administration officials acknowledge they had advance knowledge of the language he would use and sought to influence it, as one official said, "at the margins."

-- Butler ordered his inspectors to evacuate Baghdad, in anticipation of a military attack, on Tuesday night - at a time when most members of the Security Council had yet to receive his report.

Lavrov and some other diplomats also asserted that Butler gave them far more equivocal progress reports, in the days leading up to his written report, than his final conclusion that he is "not able to conduct the substantive disarmament work" because of the "absence of full cooperation by Iraq."

"What we were told by Butler for weeks was yes, we've hit some roadblocks but the inspections are going on," said one New York-based diplomat. 

An extraordinary conflict has erupted within the highest echelons of the United Nations as Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General, attempted to discredit and oust Richard Butler, the combative Australian who heads the UN weapons inspection mission to Iraq.

The power struggle in New York has been brought into the open by disclosure that the United States used Mr Butler's teams to spy on Saddam Hussein. Although the Unscom chief denied the claims, American officials have since confirmed them.

In the most embarrassing development, Scott Ritter, the former arms inspector, details in the accompanying article how Mr Butler colluded with the US hijack of the UN eavesdropping operation in Iraq. The disclosures could mark the downfall of Mr Butler.

Mr Ritter predicts that the American actions will "kill" Unscom, the special commission set up after the Gulf war to track down Saddam's arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons...
Officials close to Mr Annan were behind the series of authoritative leaks to American newspapers last week disclosing that US intelligence agents had used the UN arms inspection mission to penetrate Iraq's intelligence network and track Saddam's movements and security arrangements.

Mr Butler denied the claims, only to be contradicted by American confirmation that they were true. At this stage, he demanded to know whether his mission had been unwittingly used to spy on the Iraqis.
However, the most damaging blow is likely to have been delivered by Mr Ritter, who says that Mr Butler co-operated with the US surveillance. Mr Ritter also discloses that several military sites bombed during Operation Desert Fox last month were pinpointed by American intelligence from the information they had garnered from Unscom's work.

His disclosures effectively confirm long-held Iraqi claims that the UN arms inspections were used as a cover for American espionage. But he says it is the US, not Iraq, that "killed" Unscom's mission to track down Saddam's weapons by seizing control of its eavesdropping activities...
If he goes, the celebrations will be in Baghdad but his fall will have been manufactured in New York where Mr Annan is desperate to revive the UN's role as a world peace-making body. Privately, Mr Annan is understood to be furious that Washington and London bombed Iraq last month without the backing of the other three permanent members of the Security Council: France, Russia and China.

The future of Unscom is also clouded in uncertainty. Neil Partrick, the head of the Middle East programme at London's Royal United Services Institute, said America and London are planning for a "containment-plus" policy without Unscom.

He said: "The target of containment will rely on military strikes to keep Saddam under control and prevent him extending his military operations or weapons of mass destruction. The 'plus' element is the policy of backing Iraqi opposition groups that want to overthrow Saddam."

I know this is straying a bit but speaking of the buildup of troops on the border before the war does anyone remember the old argument about how we couldn't afford to keep our troops waiting there indefinitely because it would hurt morale and would be too expensive?

Now that we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for each bomb dropped in the invasion and are currently spending $3 billion per month to be in Iraq with no end in sight and we have given contracts worth billions and billions of dollars to reconstruct that country all while the morale of our troops has never been lower does anyone still believe that argument made any sense? 

Butler denies serving U.S. war aims
Uproar as Annan tries to sack chief of Unscom
It seems that the Clinton administration was involved in something of an intellegience fiasco itself, in particular spying through and possibly controlling UN inspectors. Does this invalidate Clinton's justification for his bombing campaign?

I hate it when I find out another dirty little secret done by the US government that in all honesty I was too lazy or self involved to care about while it was happening. I had a duty to educate myself and should have kept informed, spoke up, and held the leadership accountable (as much as a nobody like me is able to anyway).