ments. Clinton and his foreign policy team, led by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, achieved considerable successes in Northern Ireland and Israel. With Iraq, however, in the wake of ongoing showdowns between Saddam Hussein and UN weapons-inspection teams, the administration came to consider that diplomatic measures had been exhausted; on Dec. 16, 1998, Clinton, together with British prime minister Tony Blair, authorized renewed air strikes against Iraq. On the domestic front the Whitewater affair consumed much of the president's final years in office. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation of allegations of wrongdoing by Clinton and his wife, begun in 1994, eventually expanded to include charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power, which arose from a relationship between the president and a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The ensuing scandal preoccupied the capital from January 1998 on. Clinton adamantly denied any sexual involvement with Lewinsky, but the Starr investigation developed evidence to the contrary. In August Clinton admitted to an "inappropriate relationship." Because Clinton had testified under oath both in a civil case and before the grand jury that he had not had such a relationship, he was open to the charge of perjury. Starr delivered his report to the House of Representatives on Sept. 9, 1998. In November the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment hearings, which ended in mid-December with the refusal to entertain a Democratic motion for censure and the drafting of four articles of impeachment. On Dec. 16, exactly one day before the full House was scheduled to vote on the articles, Clinton launched renewed air strikes against Iraq, causing some of his opponents to claim that the attack was a diversionary tactic - one, moreover, of unprecedented scope. On Dec. 19, 1998, the full House approved two of the four articles (perjury and obstruction of justice). Clinton thus beca...
