Clinton Cabinet Officer's Idea to Provoke War with Iraq

[Smaland]

General Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, has a new memoir out that contains this significant-seeming story: Back in the late 1990s, Shelton says a member of Clinton's cabinet asked him to allow Saddam Hussein to shoot down an American plane over Iraq as a pretext for starting a war. The way Shelton tells the story, this was a serious request.

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[anonymaus]

The idea, as the body of the article states, was to not do everything possible to protect the plane--thus allowing the Iraqis to shoot it down. The Iraqis has been firing at those planes on a daily basis since GW1 ended; the policy of the United States was to remove Saddam from power based on his record; Iraq met the conditions under which a nation gave up its right to sovereignty in the eyes of the international community. In spite of all of that, the UN would not budge. It's no surprise they were looking for an excuse to engage the Iraqis given the situation.