March 10, 1999

Serial Offender

"All governments lie."

So said I.F. Stone, the crusading, progressive journalist.

"All men, all men are liars." So sang Nick Lowe, the British pub-rocker.

Within the administration of Bill Clinton, these two sentiments fuse. But enough about the lies about sex. Those lies, in their essence, affect but a few. The larger national landscape is covered by a snowfall of Clinton prevarications, falsehoods related to matters much less frivolous than a one-sided sexual romp in the executive mansion. And this white-out is in plain sight.

Last week, a citizen could pick up The Washington Post and by perusing only the front-page offerings reach the conclusion that this is a deeply dishonest administration (which, of course, hardly distinguishes it from its predecessors). In one article, U.S. government documents and employees were cited to reveal that U.S. intelligence had infiltrated agents for three years into the UN arms-control teams in Iraq. When the allegation that American spies had penetrated the UN Special Commission first arose, Clinton officials claimed that the only spying done had been conducted in cooperation with UNSCOM in order to help the weapons inspectors win the hide-and-seek game they were playing with Saddam Hussein. On February 23, Deputy State Department spokesman James Foley declared that charges of U.S. espionage within UNSCOM were "unfathomable except as elements which can only serve Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine."

This was the diplomatic equivalent of "I did not have sex with that woman" finger-wagging. And it was particularly noxious since this government official was asserting that the charge was propaganda and suggesting that anyone who dared pass along such information was aiding and abetting the dictator-enemy. As it turns out, U.S. spies indeed had exploited UNSCOM -- without UNSCOM permission -- to capture Iraqi military communications unrelated to weapons inspections.

Who cares if U.S. covert operators got the better of Hussein? Well, they did so at a tremendous cost: the discrediting of the premise of international weapons inspections. Why should any government -- let alone Hussein's -- ever again allow a supposedly multilateral UN inspection team to poke about? For the sake of military intelligence, which the United States could use its one-sided undeclared war against Iraq, it compromised a system that was not the United States' to jeopardize. In future cases, how can the to-be-inspected nation believe that a UN team is what it claims to be? Certainly, it will not be able to take Foley or any other U.S. official at their word on such a subject. They have no compunction about peddling untruths.

The Post noted that U.S. officials did consider that exposure of the spying operation might undermine the international arms control system. But they thought the chances of getting caught were slim. Whoops. The rest of the world ought to protest and note that it was not Washington's prerogative to weaken an arms control program that served the interests of nations other than the United States.

Abutting the Post story on the Administration's UNSCOM lie was an article reporting that the United States had intensified its air strikes against Iraq. The official Pentagon line is that U.S. pilots are merely replying to Iraqi efforts to shoot down U.S. and British planes patrolling the no-fly zone. "We responded to attacks upon our aircraft by targeting those facilities that allowed the Iraqi forces to place our pilots in jeopardy," Defense Secretary and poet William Cohen said. But the truth was less elegant. A U.S. official told the Post that allied aircraft were flying into certain areas to provoke the Iraqis to turn on their radar, which then could be bombed by the U.S. and British jets. But will Cohen come out and admit that? No, this wordsmith will stick to the half-truth.

Another recent news report illuminated one more type of Clinton lie: the non-truth. In his State of the Union speech in January, Clinton, referring to his $8 billion plan to rescue the deteriorating Florida Everglades, boasted, "We're restoring the Florida Everglades." You can guess the rest. Last week, a front-page story in The New York Times revealed that credible experts -- far more credible than the President -- say Clinton's project will do little to revive the Everglades. It's not just that the experts were jabbing at the plan once they got to see it. These objections were made before the speech. In a report last year, the scientific and technical staff of the Everglades National Park concluded the Clinton proposal "does not represent a restoration scenario" for the glorious marshlands. Who are you going to believe, the folks waist-deep in the muck or the President?

The lies pour forth, almost every day, on the important stuff: national security, environmental policy. And where are the howls from those who obsess over Monicagate and the Juanita Broaddrick allegations and, with those personal matters in mind, decry the moral decrepitude of Clinton and the comrades who stand by him? There was no call for a congressional inquiry from Trent Lott or Tom DeLay when we learned the Administration had lied to defend its bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan (an act of war ordered by Clinton in extraconstitutional fashion). Bill Bennett and his amen chorus on the right bitch about declining standards of truth and morality. The problem with the political culture is not the absence of outrage; it is the widespread presence of selective outrage.

Clinton: The Novel

Like Clinton foes, Clinton champions neglect the less salacious but more significant lies of his administration. In January, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the titanic Latin American author, wrote an apologia for Bill Clinton that was published around the world. He hailed the President as a man of intelligence and deep literary knowledge but chided him for over-apologizing for doing "what the common man has done behind his wife's back since the world began." Okay, chalk up Marquez's defense to the fabled Latino machismo and the fact that he once had a delightful dinner with Clinton at William Styron's summer house on Martha's Vineyard, where the President cited portions from Don Quixote and The Sound and the Fury. But the line that provoked gagging was this: "The entire impeachment process has been a sinister plot by fanatics for the personal destruction of a political adversary whose grandeur they could not bear." Grandeur? Put aside Broaddrick's charges and Lewinsky's facts, the man Marquez praises lied about his inaction regarding the genocide in Rwanda. His administration has obstructed international efforts to pry documents out of U.S. agencies regarding the murderous misdeeds of right-wing brutes in Chile and Honduras. When a State Department official named Rick Nuccio informed a member of Congress of evidence the CIA had worked with a homicidal thug in Guatemala, Clinton and his aides stood by as the CIA destroyed this official's career. Grandeur? Who wants to argue over a word with a master like Marquez? But it takes more than reciting Cervantes and Faulkner to achieve greatness. In the opening paragraph of his piece, Marquez refers to Clinton's "power of seduction: from the first handshake he oozes the familiarity of an old friend." Clinton has gotten far with such a power. It is unfortunate that only Clinton's most base use and abuse of this power has drawn so much attention and, consequently, captured the imagination of Marquez.

Clinton, perhaps still feeling (as he once said to Sidney Blumenthal) like a character in a Russian novel, has, in these post-Broaddrick days, complained that an "unwelcome vapor trail" is following him. If Marquez could apply his magical realism to Clinton, he might concoct a character, say a village official, who upon leaving office lives among his neighbors forever enshrouded in a fog. But, then, that fellow wouldn't be much different than Pigpen.

Sympathy for the Lady

Given that Hillary Clinton sabotaged health care reform (through political ineptitude, not malice), that she has for decades coasted on the coattails of her husband's policy lies, and that she has had her own troubles in the truth-telling department (see the commodities deal), it is hard to feel sorry for her. But when she appeared at a UN conference and spoke on women's rights, only the most hardened Clinton basher could not experience a pang of empathy. After weeks of Broaddrick-related chatter, she stood before the world and said, "It is no longer acceptable to say that the abuse and mistreatment of women is cultural. It should be called what it is -- criminal." Of course, she was speaking of such oppressors as the militant Islamic Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. Still, this Clinton moment was wince city.

Fly the Chinese Skies

On January 1, 2000, according to Xinhua, China's official news agency, the heads of China's twenty-three airlines will board their planes and take a trip -- in accordance with a government directive. The point is to show Chinese air travelers that they need not fret about the Y2K computer bug, which might trip up navigation equipment and traffic control systems. The Chinese are on to something. Imagine if the CEOs of the HMOs had to enroll in their own plans. Or the head of a company that makes breast implants had to be implanted herself before her company obtained FDA approval. Or the top managers of utilities companies had to live within ten miles of their spewing facilities. Or, to return to our inspiring example from China, airline executives always had to fly coach. What a wonderful world it would be. These days the Red-and-Green Chinese are swiping plenty of pages from the capitalist playbook. Perhaps we can import this idea from them.

-- David Corn