President Gore? Jude Wanniski January 22, 1998

It is now extremely difficult to see how President Clinton can remain in office. It would be nice to think he is telling the truth about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky and that this latest Clinton sex scandal will turn out to be a bad dream for him, the nation and the world. Alas, to put it indelicately, there appears to be a smoking gun. If he could hang on until August, he would be able to exactly duplicate the 5½ years Richard Nixon spent in office. But the tapes in the hands of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr and the FBI are said to be so conclusive -- and “shocking beyond description” according to a woman who heard them and is quoted in today’s NYTimes -- that unless some crisis suddenly emerges that requires presidential continuity and pushes the story off the front pages, the President might not make it through this winter. 

Unhappily, in Iraq, the President has just such a crisis readily at hand, and he is already being advised to seize it. In his Times column today, “Presume Innocence,” William Safire asks us to take “his flat denial of yesterday to be true, and assuming the current firestorm to be fanned by a misunderstanding or a sinister conspiracy, we need the President to address the needs of two compartments -- the one to make peace, the other to make war.” To “make peace,” Clinton is needed to support the position of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and tell Yasir Arafat and his Palestinians to take it or “lose their last chance in this generation.” To “make war,” Safire writes: “In the Persian Gulf, preventive war is becoming more necessary every day. Saddam Hussein is producing his anthrax weapon for a clear purpose: to credibly threaten us with its use. When he gains the power of massive biological retaliation, our conventional and nuclear power becomes useless against him. If Clinton does not stop him now, the next President will face a far more horrific choice.” Safire does recognize that if Clinton does these things, it “will be seen as motivated by a need to divert attention from the lurid new charges being made about Clinton’s personal behavior.” He asks Starr to clear up the charges quickly, one way or the other, perhaps having in mind that a President Albert Gore would be free to engage in “preventive war” without suspicions he is doing so to divert attention from a scandal. 

Happily, Robert Novak’s syndicated column today reports that Jack Kemp’s Iraq initiative is making waves. Last Friday, Kemp issued a statement urging the UN Security Council to consider the idea of a limited number of “snap inspections” within Iraq each month, with no area off limits, but with Baghdad assured that the sanctions would then be lifted if nothing is found. “There has to be some light at the end of the tunnel,” Kemp told Novak, for Iraq to escape sanctions so painful for its people. In his reporting, Novak found that National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, Defense Secretary Bill Cohen, and UN Ambassador Bill Richardson are all privately in favor of breaking the deadlock with Iraq, but Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has sold Clinton on the idea of keeping the sanctions in place until Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. This is the position of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), from which Safire takes his cues, and which it has sold to the Republican right. Kemp’s initiative -- which Novak says Iraqi UN Ambassador Nizar Hamdoon found “interesting” -- thus breaks AIPAC’s monopoly over both political parties on this issue. Kemp, of course, will be condemned by the right for breaking ranks, but he now provides a place for opponents of “preventive war” to gather. This now makes it extremely difficult for Clinton to proceed on that track. The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that three Catholic bishops have announced they will go on a hunger strike to protest the Iraqi sanctions, that at least 15 to 20 other bishops are expected to participate, and that 54 bishops of the 360 in the hierarchy have sent a letter to President Clinton expressing concerns: “Sanctions have taken the lives of well over 1 million persons, 60 percent of whom are children under 5 years of age,” the bishops told Clinton. “The 1991 bombing campaign destroyed electric, water and sewage plants, as well as agricultural, food and medical production facilities.” 

On its face, the Kemp initiative would seem to be one that Iraq would reject because it still requires the UN to have access to all the palaces Saddam says are off limits. But because the inspection team would be limited to only two or so per month, the burden would be placed on the teams to only go where there would be a chance of finding something. If after seven years of looking they have not discovered an Iraqi nuclear or chemical weapons capability (that they were not taken to by the Iraqis themselves), they are unlikely to find a biological capability, which can be hidden in a small house. Iraq is 10,000 square miles larger than California. The chess players in Saddam’s employ should see this as a genuinely even-handed exchange. Certainly, Iraq’s allies in Moscow, Paris and the Islamic world should see it that way too.

Why the charade? Israel does not want Iraq to sell oil that could fund a new weapons program, which is a worthy objective, but not at the horrific cost of human life that now assumes holocaust proportions. The Safire argument that we must blow Baghdad to bits, just to make sure, is a mirror image of the Third Reich’s final solution. This ends-justifies-the-means mania is an outgrowth of the Munich Syndrome, which has the Jewish political establishment in its grip. Prior to the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein appeared to be a man who had to be stopped at Munich, but that’s what we did. A “preventive war” against this defeated man and his suffering people is an evil idea, which if carried out would turn the world against us. “Senior U.S. military officers,” Novak reports today, “believe such an assault would end American influence in the oil-rich Gulf.”

Would Bill Clinton do such a thing? During Labor Day weekend of 1996, for the kick-off of his presidential campaign, the President called his Defense Secretary and ordered the bombing of Iraq. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott observed that this seemed to be a violation of the War Powers Act, since it was done without consulting any members of the Republican Congress. But because GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole applauded the bombing, debate stopped and Clinton got away with murder. I wrote a client letter at the time saying if I were in the House, I would file impeachment proceedings. It would be preferable that a sitting President be expelled from office for violating a principle that separates the United States from tinhorn dictatorships. If Kemp were in the House, he would have filed impeachment papers, but he was on the Dole ticket, muzzled. Now he is not, and his initiative opens the debate on what kind of imperial power the United States is going to be in the 21st century: Bombs away, or adherence to constitutional principle. 

What kind of President will Albert Gore, Jr. make? A crippled, caretaker President. Power will shift to the Republican Congress, especially to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Already battered by his own campaign fundraising scandal, Gore would be unable to make a move without clearance of the leaders in Congress. Certainly there would be no “preventive war.” I’d worry if he did win re-election in 2000, because he could then claim a mandate to fight global warming, etc. I’ve never really thought Gore could be elected President on his own, but we should start getting used to the idea of having him around for the next three years.