by Frank J. Gaffney

About the author: Frank J. Gaffney held senior positions in the Ronald Reagan Defense Department and signed the 1998 open letter of the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf. He is the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.

In February 1998 a group of distinguished security-policy practitioners addressed an open letter to President Bill Clinton under the banner of the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf. The signatories were seized with what was even then a pressing problem: the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

These experts—many of whom now hold top positions in the George W. Bush administration (including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State Richard...