WASHINGTON — President Bill Clinton’s advisers carefully considered how to explain the president’s military action against Iraq in 1998 as the House was debating his impeachment, according to records from the Clinton White House that were released Friday.
The National Archives released about 1,000 pages of previously restricted documents from Clinton’s two terms, part of about 20,000 pages of Clinton records that have been disseminated since February. The papers, which are stored at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., have received interest as former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton considers another presidential bid.
The White House mulled how to explain Clinton’s decision to launch a military strike against Iraq the day before the House was to debate bringing impeachment charges against the president in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
The notes of national security aide Tony Blinken include a draft of Clinton’s address announcing the air strikes in December 1998 as a response to Saddam Hussein’s refusal to allow United Nations inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The draft indicates White House counsel Charles Ruff cleared a version that would say, ‘‘All of us would have preferred that the need for this action had not arisen on this day — on the eve of the impeachment debate in the House of Representatives.’’
Instead, Clinton’s address ended up sticking close to what the draft refers to as White House chief of staff John Podesta’s version. The president said, ‘‘Saddam Hussein and the other enemies of peace may have thought that the serious debate currently before the House of Representatives would distract Americans, or weaken our resolve to face him down.’’