Clinton Administration

WASHINGTON -- Two months after President Clinton pledged greater support for efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials have failed to persuade the disparate and divided Iraqi opposition to hold a meeting, let alone organize a revolt."

WASHINGTON -- A month before a U.S. deadline for Libya to hand over two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, administration officials say they are planning to seek tougher economic sanctions against the country. After months of diplomatic maneuvering, Col. Muammar el Kadafi has given no sign he will accept a compromise from the United States and Britain on trial arrangements in the case.President Clinton announced in December that the United States would push for tougher U.N. sanctions if Libya failed to hand over two intelligence agents for trial in the Netherlands by the end of February.

WASHINGTON -- Seeking to beef up his foreign policy credentials, Texas Gov. George W. Bush portrayed himself yesterday as a committed internationalist whose administration would ration the use of U.S. military power abroad.In his first foreign policy address, the Republican front-runner sketched out a mainstream vision of the U.S. role in international affairs. He cautioned against the "drift" of an ad hoc foreign policy that moves "from crisis to crisis, like a cork in a current.""America must be involved in the world," Bush said, in a counter to isolationist sentiment in his own party.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration announced new measures yesterday to crack down further on parents who owe large amounts of child support, saying it will seek criminal prosecutions in addition to the money owed.The administration said it would establish four new task forces, expanding coverage to 17 states. They will be established in Baltimore; Sacramento, Calif.; New York and Dallas, and will be based on a model project in Columbus, Ohio, launched last year.The Baltimore task force office will cover Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington.

WASHINGTON -- Eager to ease a political and national security headache, the Clinton administration has decided to mediate the fate of a Puerto Rican island that has served as a Navy bombing range for 58 years, administration sources said yesterday.Undersecretary of Defense Rudy F. de Leon has been selected to try to resolve the issue with Puerto Rican officials, who are demanding that the bombing stop and are pressuring Vice President Al Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton, a likely New York Senate candidate, to side with them.

LOS ANGELES -- The Clinton administration has maintained a studied public neutrality in the Israeli campaign for prime minister. But it has made little effort to conceal its interest in a victory for Ehud Barak, the Labor Party candidate.Burned by his all-but-open endorsement of Shimon Peres, the Labor candidate in the 1996 Israeli election, President Clinton has said nothing in public about the contest between the incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, and his chief challenger, Barak.

THE DEPARTURE of Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin could have been cause for alarm. He is, after all, the heaviest hitter on Team Clinton, the chief architect of much that has gone right. Had Mr. Rubin departed during the impeachment scandal, it might have destabilized Wall Street.But Mr. Rubin waited. It was known he wanted to get back to private finance. So Wednesday, calm confidence greeted President Clinton's announcement of Mr. Rubin's resignation and the the nomination of his deputy, Lawrence H. Summers, as successor.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration warned yesterday that any second-guessing by the U.S. courts about airstrikes in Yugoslavia would risk "ceding victory" to Serbian forces and could put European security "in grave jeopardy."Even holding a court hearing on a constitutional challenge to the airstrikes, the administration argued in legal papers, could suggest "a lack of U.S. resolve" in the conflict.Request to dismiss plannedThese arguments came as the Justice Department prepared to file a formal request to U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman to throw out a lawsuit filed by 26 members of the House.

WASHINGTON -- The United States has decided to sell an early warning radar system to Taiwan that would allow the Taiwanese to monitor the launch of Chinese ballistic missiles or manned bombers, Clinton administration officials said yesterday.The sale has drawn protests from Beijing and was opposed by a group of mid-level administration officials who believed that it would worsen recent tensions between Washington and Beijing.The administration approved the sale at the recommendation of senior policy-makers from the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon who believed that China's deployment of large numbers of short-range missiles along its coastline posed a serious military threat to Taiwan, officials said.

Faced with renewed fighting in Congo and a human catastrophe in Angola, the Clinton administration is planning a series of new initiatives for Africa, the American representative at the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, said yesterday. He intends to lay out the policies in a speech today in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa.The United States will assume the presidency of the Security Council on Jan. 1 and will schedule public debate on the multiple crises facing Africa, Holbrooke said in a telephone interview while traveling in Africa.

KENNETH BACON, 64 Noted Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon, a Pentagon spokesman in the Clinton administration who became a voice for millions of refugees uprooted by violence and conflict, died Saturday of skin cancer that had spread to his brain. He was 64. His death at his vacation home in Block Island, R.I., was announced by Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group that Bacon had led since 2001. "Most Americans remember Ken as the unflappable civilian voice of the Department of Defense," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement.

Cordell Hull was a veteran lawmaker with a worldwide reputation when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him secretary of state in 1933, in part to win needed support from Hull's army of Democratic admirers. But the dignified Tennessean was never close to FDR. As time passed he was "muscled out by others in the administration," said Michael Hunt, a diplomatic historian at the University of North Carolina. Barack Obama's election as president has drawn other comparisons with Roosevelt, especially for the economic crisis he inherits.

The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill - and his cult of personality - will go down with the ship, too. Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats that HMS Hillary could transport America "back to the future."

WASHINGTON -- The new international nuclear agreement with North Korea marks a fundamental change in direction for the Bush administration after years of frustration in its hard-line campaign to force Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program without immediate rewards. In his first term, President Bush rejected Clinton administration attempts to win North Korean cooperation with aid. He declared that only after "complete, verified, irreversible dismantlement" of its nuclear program could the regime receive U.S. help.

Repudiate insults to city officials In what way, exactly, does Baltimore attorney William H. "Billy" Murphy Jr. think that Adolf Hitler was "effective," and how dare he equate the Baltimore police or Mayor Martin O'Malley with Hitler ("Murphy is denounced for linking Nazis, police," Sept. 30)? Shamefully, when given the opportunity to apologize or withdraw his statement, Mr. Murphy instead chose to congratulate himself for making his point, and Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s campaign spokeswoman denounced Mr. Murphy's critics instead of renouncing his remarks.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Former President Bill Clinton shook his left index finger at Chris Wallace during an interview on Fox News Sunday, denying charges he and his administration did too little to catch Osama bin Laden and ward off the 9/11 terror attacks. Leaning forward and appearing angry, Mr. Clinton said, "At least I tried. That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They [the Bush administration] had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

WASHINGTON -- Here are five words that I never expected to put together in the same sentence: Bill Clinton owes Rush Limbaugh. Yes, it was El Rushbo, hero of the right, who leaked word via his national radio show that the Clinton administration, target of the right, was about to be trashed in ABC's docudrama The Path to 9/11. Actually, Mr. Limbaugh's leak was more of a gusher. Boasting that the screenwriter, Cyrus Nowrasteh, is a friend of his, Mr. Limbaugh said the movie "indicts the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger.

Fact or fiction? That question is at the heart of a heated controversy over the miniseries The Path to 9/11, which traces the events leading to the Sept. 11 attacks and is set to air on ABC on Sunday and Monday. Members of the Clinton administration, including former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, have protested vociferously in recent days that the miniseries inaccurately blames Clinton officials for not going after Osama bin Laden when they had the chance. "It asserts as fact things that are not fact," Albright wrote Tuesday in a letter to Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of ABC's parent, the Walt Disney Co. Albright, Samuel R. Berger, who was Clinton's national security adviser, and former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke have taken particular exception to a sequence in which American military officers in Afghanistan appear to allow bin Laden to escape after the mission to capture him fails to get a go-ahead from Clinton officials in Washington.

WASHINGTON - While the world focuses on threats of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, one of the key figures in pulling America from the brink of nuclear war nearly 43 years ago now advocates "the elimination - or near-elimination - of all nuclear weapons." Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was part of President John F. Kennedy's inner circle that navigated the United States out of the fearful confrontation with the Soviet Union over its placing nukes in Cuba in 1962, calls for their abandonment in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

WASHINGTON - After three years of war and challenging the world to line up alongside the United States or "with the terrorists," President Bush is wrapping the hard edge of his second-term foreign policy in a softer message: freedom. Announcing his nomination of confidante Condoleezza Rice to become secretary of state, Bush highlighted his national security adviser's childhood in the segregated South, where "she has seen freedom denied and freedom reborn." The president, in his remarks, continued to give top priority to fighting insurgents in Iraq, breaking up terror networks and curbing the spread of the world's deadliest weapons, reminding Americans that "we're a nation at war."