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

To: cody andre who wrote (40957)	3/31/1999 12:04:00 PM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

U.S. SECURITY: BILL'S ACHILLES HEEL By DICK MORRIS AS the details of Monica Lewinsky's sexuality fade from public view, the lapses in our security relationship with our prime global rival, China, will emerge as the central scandal of this administration. Historians will joke that Starr and the Republicans snooped in the bedroom while ignoring the obvious scandal in the situation room. From the first days of the Clinton administration, our policy toward China was flawed. Taking office in the aftermath of the Cold War, President Clinton saw a world of customers without any rivals. Facing re-election, he realized that tapping into the Chinese market could bring big campaign contributions from U.S. companies willing to pay the toll. Contributions to the Democratic National Committee became the EZ-Pass to the global superhighway of commerce. It is a cruel irony of our political history that presidents have tended to win their elections by pledging action on either the foreign or the domestic front and have usually delivered, only to be undone by the other half of their job. Those elected to solve foreign crises usually ended up falling over domestic problems; the foreign-policy presidents were most frequently undone by domestic considerations. Will foreign policy be Clinton's downfall? Will this president, so clearly elected to cope with America's domestic difficulties, fail abroad and so undermine his solid record of domestic achievement? Consider the precedents. President Truman was elected to continue the New Deal and failed over the stalemate in the Korean War. President Eisenhower, elected to bring peace to Korea, lost popularity by failing to deal effectively with the three recessions during his tenure. President Johnson was chosen to prosecute the war on poverty and discrimination but fell over war in Vietnam instead. President Nixon's prime task was to bring peace to Southeast Asia, but he unraveled over Watergate. President Carter's victory was prompted by our desire for higher ethics, but the hostage crisis was his undoing. President Reagan, elected to cut taxes, failed in the Iran-Contra affair. President Bush, selected because he could end the Cold War, fell over the recession. Now Clinton, the ultimate domestic-policy president, faces reversals in foreign policy and national security. It is increasingly clear that the need to prevent political embarrassment over the security flaws in our dealings with China stymied efforts to plug the leak in the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. Rather than crack down on Chinese spying when the FBI reported it, Energy Secretary Federico Pena turned a blind eye and even let the likely spy stay on the job. Pena, who had lost his job as transportation secretary over his defense of the airline responsible for the worst U.S. crash of recent times, was as compliant in coping with China as he was with Valujet. For his part, Clinton's blind spot is that he could not get it through his head that what's good for American business is not necessarily good for American security. From the Loral and Hughes satellite launches to the Los Alamos spying, China has exploited our greed and our openness to steal important secrets. In a scene reminiscent of the movie ''Bridge On the River Kwai,'' U.S. scientists helpfully coached the Chinese on how to launch satellites successfully without asking the State Department if their advice constituted a breach of national security. Clinton has tried to substitute a variety of successes in the ''B'' theaters, like Bosnia and the Middle East, and in ''C'' theaters, like Haiti and Northern Ireland, for progress in the ''A'' areas of Russia and China. He has mirrored his bite-size domestic achievements with bite-sized foreign accomplishments. Yet in domestic affairs, he delivered in the prime areas of welfare, the deficit and the economy - while in foreign policy he has met reversal after reversal in the most important questions of national security. OK, nobody elected Clinton to be a foreign-policy genius. Bush had it about right in 1992 when he said that Clinton's foreign-policy experience was limited to the International House of Pancakes. We no more chose Clinton for his foreign-policy expertise than we chose Bush for his knowledge of economics. Yet presidents tend to be judged on their failures, and Clinton's lapses on foreign policy and national security may come home to haunt him. In an era when the economy is doing fine, smaller social issues predominate. When even these social problems are moving toward solution, America tends to become preoccupied by scandal. Now, when even the scandal has become boring, we turn our attention to real and fancied threats from abroad. The American people cannot long stand the absence of bad news. We create threats where there are none and we impute power to our adversaries they only wish they had. In this atmosphere, the China issue could assume a centrality to our political dialogue that could hurt Clinton ... and Gore. Yes, Gore. After all, the vice president was the administration's point man on technology and its negotiator with the Russians over nuclear-transfer issues. Is it much of a stretch to ask what were his duties in the dealings with China? The GOP will not fail to ask this question, and a new issue for Gore to face in the 2000 election will be born. However the sideshow in Kosovo turns out, the issue of defense, espionage and national security will loom large in both the next election and in the view historians take of the Clinton presidency.