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 The Chronicle welcomes you online! Please feel free to respond to these editorials or letters to the editor by sending your letters to the editor.

We condense letters; most, as published, won't exceed 300 words. A letter must include the writer's name and city, which will be published, and an address and telephone number for verification, which will not be published. Writers may be limited to one letter every 30 days. Open letters, letters to third parties and poetry are not considered. Letters from people living outside the Chronicle's circulation area usually are not considered.

Jerked around again

Web posted November 17, 1998

Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So how many times is President Clinton going to be fooled by Saddam Hussein?

Once again Uncle Sam has egg on his face after the Iraqi despot successfully pulled off his cheat-and-retreat strategy for the second time this year -- and the fifth time in the last several years.

The scenario is always the same. Saddam flagrantly breaks his pledge to allow United Nations inspection teams to seek out Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. starts a military buildup.

At the 11th hour, Saddam makes ``concessions'' and U.S. forces stand down.

Several months later, like a bad summer TV rerun, the episode repeats itself. Each of these massive deployments cost U.S. taxpayers about a billion dollars; after awhile that adds up to real money.

What's particularly inexplicable about this past weekend is National Security Adviser Sandy Berger publicly stated, while U.S. warplanes were on their way to clobber Iraq, that the U.S. rejected the regime's last minute ``concession'' as ``unacceptable.''

Well, if it was unacceptable, why was the bombing mission aborted? This made no sense. Neither did the administration's all-night brainstorming to figure out its next move.

As often as they'd been down this road before, surely officials should have anticipated the retreat. Instead they acted totally surprised by it.

No less convincing was President Clinton's Sunday announcement that Iraq had totally capitulated and would allow the inspectors back in with ``unfettered access'' to all suspected weapons sites.

Like deja vuall over again, these were the same words Clinton used when the Iraqis ``capitulated'' last February. The ``access'' lasted only a few months before the inspectors were again blocked and eventually thrown out, triggering the latest crisis.

No one has an iota of doubt that it's only a matter of time -- weeks? months? -- before Saddam plays cheat-and-retreat again. After all, he is proclaiming a huge victory by forcing the U.S. to stand down.

Yes, he does have plenty to brag about. And if cheat-and-retreat worked six times, why not seven? Nothing better demonstrates U.S. foreign policy incompetence than the way Saddam plays the administration like a Stradivarius.