Calling president Clinton mamby pamby

The aims of this letter seem to be pretty obvious. It is to urge president Clinton to take a tougher stance on Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Especially when it came to the use of military means. This letter is vary much a persuasive work. The letter was in response to the fact that Saddam had not been allowing UN inspectors to inspect the installations he agreed to allow them in to after the gulf war (CNN). The UN placed diplomatic sanction after sanction on Iraq but they were to no avail. President Clinton was a big supporter of this tactic and was vary wary to discuss military action (CNN). This made the group Project for the New American Century write this letter. Their beliefs are clearly written that Saddam was too dangerous to fool around with. Some of these names are familiar to us; particularly Donald Rumsfeld. Other notables are; John Bolton who was later one of our representatives at the UN. Paul Wolfowitz who in 1989 was the Under Secretary for Defence policy and later would become the Deputy Secretary of Defence under Donald Rumsfeld (NNDB). So this letter was written by some fairly prominent policy people of the last two decades. This builds a strong ethos for the work which can be very important for the act of persuasion. The writers spell out in plain terms what they feel the danger is. That being Saddam's lack of cooperation and the potential for him to possess and use WMD's. They point out the dangers of the situation. One being that the region contains "a significant portion of the worlds supply of oil will all be put at hazard." This being a strong argument being that everything in daily American life has oil involved somehow. They also point out that even the idea of Iraq being equipped with WMD's itself could "have a seriously destabilizing effect on the Middle East." Also not a fun idea to mess around with. The letter then suggests the removal of Saddam and his government by "diplomatic, political and military efforts." as "the only acceptable strategy".
For this letter the use of audience construction is fairly straight forward if, it was in fact a direct letter to president Clinton. From the letter itself it is purely addressed to President Clinton. The language itself also gives us an impression that the letter is in fact a direct letter. Phrases such as "as you have rightly stated" and "we urge you".
In the end this letter may have well affected President Clinton because he did take some military action in December of 1998 to "degrade" Iraq's WMD production capability (wikipedia)