Bill Clinton: “Well, I believe that we did the appropriate thing under the circumstances. Saddam Hussein is under a U.N. resolution not…”

“Well, I believe that we did the appropriate thing under the circumstances. Saddam Hussein is under a U.N. resolution not to threaten his neighbors or repress his own citizens. Unfortunately, a lot of people have never been as concerned about the Kurds as the United States has tried to be, and we've been flying an operation to protect them out of Turkey for many years now. What happened was, one of the Kurdish leaders invited him to go up north. But we felt, since the whole world community had told him not to do it, that once he did it we had to do something. We did not feel that I could commit--I certainly didn't feel I should commit American troops to throw him out of where he had gone, and that was the only way to do that. So the appropriate thing strategically to do was to reduce his ability to threaten his neighbors. We did that by expanding what's called the no-fly zone, by increasing our allies' control of the airspace, now from the Kuwait border to the suburbs of Baghdad. Was it the right thing to do? I believe it was. Is it fully effective? Did it make him withdraw from the north? Well, he has a little bit, and I hope he will continue. We have learned that if you give him an inch he'll take a mile. We had to do something. And even though not all of our allies supported it at first, I think most of them now believe that what we did was an appropriate thing to do. Mr. Lehrer. Senator Dole. Senator Dole. Well, the President's own CIA Director says that Saddam is stronger now than he was. And I don't understand extending the no-fly zone in the south when the trouble was in the north. And what we've done--during the Bush administration the Kurds were at the State Department negotiating, trying to work their differences out. Now we've got all--thousands and thousands of refugees. We're even shipping, I guess, 3,000 Kurds to Guam. It involves Turkey. It's a real problem, and Saddam is probably stronger than he ever was. We shot, what, 44 cruise missiles--they're worth about $1.2 million apiece--and hit some radar that--repaired in a couple, 3 days. Did we inflict any damage? No. Did we have any of our allies helping? Well, we have Great Britain. They're always very loyal to us, and I appreciate that. And of course Kuwait, even though they had to find out they had 5,000 troops coming. They didn't even understand that. We had to get their permission. The bottom line is, we went in there alone. We're supposed to be operating under a U.N. resolution. We did it without any of our allies that helped us in the Gulf.”