BY JOHN M. BRODER and BARBARA CROSSETTE
N.Y. Times News Service
WASHINGTON — Acting on early word from the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, President Clinton set in motion Wednesday's military strikes a full two days before the inspector formally declared to the Security Council that Saddam Hussein was once again in defiance of the U.N. inspection program, officials said Thursday.
The president and senior administration officials said that Mr. Clinton had not made the final decision to unleash a barrage of missiles and bombs on targets across Iraq until Tuesday, hours after receiving the report by Richard Butler, the weapons inspector.
But a full two days earlier, Mr. Butler had informed Mr. Clinton what he intended to say in his report, and when he would say it. And the president issued a highly classified order to the Pentagon on Sunday morning that began a 72-hour countdown to the air assault. Mr. Clinton was in Jerusalem on the first day of a trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Mr. Butler's report was delivered formally to the U.N. Security Council and American officials as Mr. Clinton was flying home from the Middle East on Tuesday. About two hours into the 10-hour flight from Jerusalem to Washington, Mr. Clinton gave the order to U.S. forces to be prepared to strike within 24 hours.
But Mr. Butler's report was in many ways a simple formality. Officials in New York and Washington said there was little in the Butler report that had not been available to American officials days, even weeks, earlier. Military plans and hardware were already in place for raids that could have come at any time after Dec. 1.
The timing of the strikes, coming on the eve of the impeachment vote, set off protests from Republicans, who charged on Wednesday that Mr. Clinton had orchestrated a crisis to slow the seemingly inexorable momentum toward impeachment.
Speaking to reporters at the United Nations on Thursday, Mr. Butler forcefully rejected suggestions from Republicans and others skeptical of the timing of the bombing campaign that he had tailored his report or the timing of its release to give Mr. Clinton a pretext to act.
“That is utterly wrong,” Mr. Butler said. He said he had always planned to present his report to the Security Council on Monday or Tuesday, and he said that plan had not been changed by pressure from the United States.
“I want to say as simply and plainly as I can,” Mr. Butler said. “That report was based on the experts of UNSCOM. It danced to no one's tune.”
With Mr. Clinton in Israel through the weekend and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan beginning on Saturday, the window for American and British military action was very narrow, officials said.
Mr. Clinton did not make the final decision to undertake military action until after he had held a discussion aboard Air Force One with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a half-dozen members of Congress who traveled with them to the Middle East.
Ms. Albright informed the members of Congress of Mr. Butler's latest findings, saying the U.N. inspection group had presented a clear-cut case of Iraqi defiance.
Mr. Clinton asked the lawmakers for their reactions.
Although the question was not explicitly put to them, Mr. Clinton was clearly seeking to gauge the political impact of ordering American forces into action on the eve of the scheduled impeachment vote, one of the lawmakers present said.
“I said there could be no considerations other than the national security of the United States and the safety of our service personnel,” said Rep. Sam Gejdensen, D-Conn., the ranking minority member of the House International Relations Committee.
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