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Reba · 11-09-2007, 04:23 PM

A brief summary to remind people of Bill Clinton's use of American troops:

Quote:

...Two notable military events occurred during Clinton's second term. The first was Operation Desert Fox, a bombing campaign designed to weaken Saddam Hussein's grip on power over Iraq. The four-day campaign lasted from December 16 to December 19, 1998. It began after Clinton signed H.R. 4655 into law on October 31, 1998, which instituted a policy of "regime change" against Iraq, though it explicitly stated that it did not speak to the use of American military forces. The law was signed months after his State of the Union Address to Congress where Clinton warned Congress of Saddam Hussein's pursuit of nuclear weapons:
“ "Together we must also confront the new hazards of chemical and biological weapons, and the outlaw states, terrorists and organized criminals seeking to acquire them. Saddam Hussein has spent the better part of this decade, and much of his nation's wealth, not on providing for the Iraqi people, but on developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. The United Nations weapons inspectors have done a truly remarkable job, finding and destroying more of Iraq's arsenal than was destroyed during the entire gulf war. Now, Saddam Hussein wants to stop them from completing their mission. I know I speak for everyone in this chamber, Republicans and Democrats, when I say to Saddam Hussein, "You cannot defy the will of the world," and when I say to him, "You have used weapons of mass destruction before; we are determined to deny you the capacity to use them again.”

The second was Operation Allied Force, a 1999 NATO bombing campaign against the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Clinton authorized the use of American troops in the mission to stop the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Albanians at the hands of the nationalist Serbians. General Wesley Clark was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO at the time and oversaw the mission. The bombing campaign ended on June 10, 1999, with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 adopted that same day, placing Kosovo under U.N. administration and authorizing a peacekeeping force. NATO claimed to have suffered zero deaths in combat, and two deaths total from an Apache helicopter crash. Pre-war genocide claims by Clinton and his administration have been criticized and discredited as greatly exaggerated. A U.N. Court ruled that genocide did not take place, although it did recognize, "a systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments". The term "ethnic cleansing" was used as an alternative to "genocide" to denote not just ethnically motivated murder but also displacement, though critics charge there is no difference.

The above is from Wiki, so not the best source but it was quick and concise; feel free to dig deeper.