And he says the U.S. military isn't strong enough to hold back Saddam Hussein.
As the fight for Virginia's U.S. Senate seat turns into a battle of blistering insults, it's the high octane rhetoric of GOP candidate Oliver North providing much of the heat.
Supporters call him a patriotic, straight-talking hero; critics says he's a right-wing extremist who can't get his facts straight. But clearly, it's North, the gap-toothed former Marine propelled to fame by the Iran-contra scandal, who's made the race against Democratic Sen. Charles Robb the year's hottest contest.
North says that's his goal: "I'm going to go to Washington to fight like the dickens. I'm not going to go along to get along. I'm not part of the insider elite."
This week, as new polls found the race too close to call, North tossed another match onto the fire with a 30-second TV ad asking, "Why can't Chuck Robb tell the truth?"
The ad has a 1991 Playboy cover featuring Tai Collins, the beauty queen who Robb admitted gave him a massage - nothing more - 10 years ago. The voice-over asks about "the cocaine parties where Robb says he never saw drugs . . . the beauty queen in a hotel room in New York? Chuck Robb lived a lie."
The ad was unveiled after a Robb TV ad called North a liar, quoting everyone from Ronald Reagan to Reader's Digest.
The mud promises to thicken in the final weeks of a campaign no one expected to stick to the issues anyway. But Robb's personal vulnerability has been North's greatest asset as he strives to deflect questions about his own past.
North appears now in campaign ads in flannel shirtsleeves, clapping shoulders of voters or sitting with his wife, Betsy, and four children at the kitchen table.
The images soften the archival memories of a very different Ollie North - the ramrod Marine who stood in full-dress uniform, defending the shredding of documents, covert operations and government lies in testimony to the Iran-contra committee in 1987.
He was convicted of three felonies in 1989 - including lying to Congress. The most serious of the convictions was later overturned because it was based on testimony for which he was given immunity.
Still, it's his Iran-contra baggage that makes him, like no other candidate this year, the object of such emotional extremes. Voters either love him or loathe him.
"I'd rather have a man who is loyal to his country and lies to Congress than a man who lies to his wife repeatedly," says Newport News, Va., family practitioner Cynthia Marks.
"North violated a public trust," says Vietnam veterans advocate Jack Wheeler, "and he violated his own school's honor code. What if you were a new plebe at Annapolis. You know what Oliver North did was wrong. What are you going to think when Virginia says its OK?"
The most recent poll by Virginia Commonwealth University shows North and Robb even at 39%, and independent candidate Marshall Coleman, a Republican moderate, trailing with 12%. Those polled are split evenly on negative elements of each candidate, too: Robb is at 49%; North 46%.
Robb's weak standing with voters contributed to North's success. But North deserves credit - carefully reworking his political persona, holding core supporters even as he reached out to the mainstream.
"At the end of my two terms in the U.S. Senate, I want the people of Virginia to think of me as an old shoe, very comfortable to be with," North told an audience recently.
And North's double-barreled message of anti-Washington and pro-family hits the right note as voter anger boils over.
"People say `that darn Congress has been lying to us and cheating us and taking our money for 30 years,' " says Fairfax County, Va., GOP chairman Pat Mullins. "And finally they got somebody who stood up to Congress, stared them down, and there wasn't a damn thing Congress could do about it."
Cocky and charming in his polished cowboy boots and plaid shirts, North criss-crosses Virginia in small planes and a 30-foot RV called "Rolling Thunder," winning converts along the way. Flashing his grin at the right moments, he wields a trained sense of the dramatic - tossing out lines to audiences that need no coaching to boo Congress or Clinton:
"I don't want to obstruct justice. What I want to do is obstruct congressmen," North says. "There hasn't been anyone standing up on the floor of the Senate and saying, as Ted Kennedy rolls down the aisle with another one of those wild ideas: `Stop Ted. We've had enough. Give up your petty perks, your privileges. . . . You cannot hear the heartbeat of America in the backseat of a limousine."
"You can take this to the bank my friends," he also says. "When I go to Washington, no flip-flopping, anti-defense yahoo from Little Rock . . . is going to tell me how to vote."
Between the attacks, North repeats a familiar blend of conservative issues such as a balanced-budget amendment, term limits, anti-gay rights, anti-gun control and broad tax cuts.
But so pointed is the rhetoric that it drew a response from Vice President Gore, who called him the "colonel of untruth."
And a number of Republicans have come out suggesting North is unfit for office, including Presidents Reagan and Ford, Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Navy Secretary James Webb, even Virginia's senior Sen. John Warner.
"Weak men fear strong men because strong men expose a weak man's weakness," offers North volunteer William Luchsinger. "He's a doer and there are few doers in life."
But other Republicans - some who once distanced themselves like Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, now campaign at his side, fearful of estranging North's backers, many from the activist religious right.
Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, traveled the state with him this week. Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney, Pat Buchanan and James Baker have all made the pilgrimage.
A primary attraction: Since 1987, North has raised upwards of $23 million for various conservative campaigns and causes. He raised $13 million alone for his legal defense fund.
Then he earned enough money - through a bullet-proof vest company, a book and speaking engagements - to buy his family a lavish horse farm in Clarke County, Va. He raised millions of dollars for local Virginia candidates in 1992. And now he has raised another $15 million for his own campaign.
"I'm the energizer saber-toothed tiger," North says. "I'm having a blast."
North's milestones
1968-69: Serves in Vietnam War
1981: Joins National Security Council
1985: Plans capture of Achille Lauro cruise hijackers
1986: Dismissed from NSC after Iran-contra scandal is made public
1987: Lies to Congress about his role in scandal; later says he
did so under orders
1989: Found guilty of obstructing Congress, destroying documents,
accepting a home security system as gift
1990: Federal appeals court reverses most serious conviction June
