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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DD™ who wrote (21807)	12/18/1998 8:37:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

December 18, 1998 Clinton's Bombs Don't Buy a Lott By PAUL A. GIGOT Trent Lott didn't become Senate Republican leader by shooting from the lip. He's cautious and politically calculating. He's also a hawk, steeped in the pro-military South, with a record of deferring to presidential war powers. So it's nothing short of stunning that this week he felt compelled to say, in effect, that he didn't believe a word President Clinton was saying about his bombing of Iraq on the eve of impeachment. Politically this was risky, if not stupid, because it opened Mr. Lott to attacks that he was undermining U.S. troops. (The Washington Post and Democratic Sen. Bob Torricelli both pounced.) But it was also an honest, considered judgment. He wasn't deterred even by a talk with the president, and he bounced it off fellow members of the GOP Senate leadership on a conference call. "I think there was general agreement," says Sen. Paul Coverdell, one of those on the call. "He was raising questions that I thought were appropriate given the incredible timing." At home in Georgia Wednesday night, Mr. Coverdell adds, "Everywhere I went that's all anyone would talk about. I must have been hit up 18 times about that movie, which I haven't even seen." He means "Wag the Dog." This is the surreal politics Bill Clinton has created: Hawks are now doves and vice versa, Watergate moralists wink at lying under oath, and the country debates not the threat from Saddam but the motives of our president. It's also the underlying reason that Mr. Clinton is now all but certain to be impeached: He has made political cynics of everyone, beyond a point that even cynical politicians can tolerate. Some compare Mr. Lott's criticism over Iraq to Democratic attacks on GOP presidents in the 1970s and 1980s, but there is a big difference. However bitter, those fights were about policy. Most Democrats disagreed with Ronald Reagan on how to pursue the Cold War. But nearly all Republicans agree that Saddam must be punished. Their problem with Bill Clinton is personal. They don't trust the message because they mistrust the man. The tragedy for American interests is that Mr. Clinton is doubted even when he might be right. There may have been good strategic reasons for him to bomb when he did this week: At least a modicum of surprise, for example, or to preempt diplomatic meddling from the French or the sometime U.S. Secretary of State, Kofi Annan of the United Nations. But Mr. Clinton also used the excuse of bombing before Sunday's start of Ramadan, the 30-day Moslem holiday. Mr. Lott worries, with good cause, that if the U.S. stops bombing after only four days nothing much will have changed in Iraq. It made more strategic sense to start any campaign last month, when Mr. Lott had pledged his support but the president backed away at the last minute. This week's bizarre timing also occurs against a history of other politically striking foreign-policy coincidences. To sell his Bosnia intervention in 1995, Mr. Clinton promised that U.S. troops would be home by election day 1996. They're still there. Shortly before that same election, he lobbed a few cruise missiles at Saddam and declared victory. When CIA director John Deutch later told Congress the truth--that the episode had made Saddam stronger--he lost his job. Three days after his Aug. 17 Monica testimony, Mr. Clinton chose to bomb terrorists and a Sudan factory. And just before this last election he took credit for an Arab-Palestinian deal that is far from complete. Foreign policy is supposed to be the art of building trust over time. With an exception or two, Mr. Clinton has spent six years doing the opposite. "How many times can it be pure coincidence?" wonders intelligence committee chairman and Florida Rep. Porter Goss, who backed Mr. Clinton on TV over Sudan but wasn't even informed about this bombing. "The real meaning of what is going on here now is that nobody believes anything." All of this helps explain this week's march of GOP moderates to impeach the president. The final week of Judiciary hearings put the focus squarely on the president's lies under oath. For the members I talked to, this was what troubled them most. "I can honestly say I got not one call from my side" of the aisle, says Nancy Johnson of Connecticut. Geraldine Ferraro called for the president, as did Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, and she got a visit from White House lawyer Greg Craig. Like other fence-sitters, Ms. Johnson wanted the president to admit some legal and financial responsibility so a vote against impeachment wouldn't be understood as condoning his lies. "But he didn't hear it, or whatever he took back to the White House wasn't heard," she says. Talking with another presidential defender, she adds, "I asked what about all of the lying? I heard a slight groan and then, 'I know, Nancy.'" Democrats will try to dismiss the vote to impeach as "partisan," as if their defense isn't partisan too. But for most Republicans the vote is better understood as a repudiation of the culture of political deceit fostered by this president. In a corner of their consciences, Democrats know this too. interactive.wsj.com