And, again, I found myself talking to someone who is normally more hawkish than I am. Scott Ritter, who served with UNSCOM from 1991 until August 1998 and who was the chief of its Concealment Investigations Unit, had been warning for months that Saddam Hussein was evading compliance inspections. This warning entailed a further accusation, which was that UNSCOM in general, and Richard Butler in particular, were too much under the day-to-day control of the Clinton administration. (An Australian career diplomat who, according to some of his colleagues, was relinquished with relief by his masters Down Under, Butler owes his job to Madeleine Albright in the first place.) Thus, when the United States did not want a confrontation with Iraq, over the summer and into the fall, Butler and the leadership acted like pussycats and caused Ritter to resign over their lack of seriousness. But then, when a confrontation was urgently desired in December, the slightest pretext would suffice. And that, Ritter says, is the bitterest irony of all. The December strikes had no real military value, because the provocation was too obviously staged.
“They sent inspectors to the Baath Party HQ in Baghdad in the week before the raids,” Ritter told me. “UNSCOM then leaves in a huff, claiming to have been denied access. There was nothing inside that facility anyway. The stuff was moved before they got there. The United States knew there was nothing in that site. And then a few days later, there are reports that cruise missiles hit the Baath Party HQ! It’s completely useless. Butler knew that I’d resign if the U.S. continued to jerk UNSCOM around, and he even came to my leaving party and bought me a drink. But now he’s utterly lost his objectivity and impartiality, and UNSCOM inspections have been destroyed in the process, and one day he’ll be hung out to dry. Ask your colleagues in Washington when they got his report.”
From the Washington Post account by Barton Gellman, on Wednesday, December 16, written the day before the bombing began and on the day that Kofi Annan saw the Butler report for the first time:
Butler’s conclusions were welcome in Washington, which helped orchestrate the terms of the Australian diplomat’s report. Sources in New York and Washington said Clinton-administration officials played a direct role in shaping Butler’s text during multiple conversations with him Monday at secure facilities in the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
“Of course,” Ritter told me almost conversationally, “though this is Wag the Dog, it isn’t quite like Sudan and Afghanistan in August, which were Wag the Dog pure and simple.”
Well, indeed, nothing is exactly like Wag the Dog. In the movie, the whole war is invented and run out of a studio, and nobody actually dies, whereas in Sudan and Afghanistan and Iraq, real corpses were lying about and blood spilled. You might argue, as Clinton’s defenders have argued in my hearing, that if there was such a “conspiracy” it didn’t work. To this there are three replies. First, no Clinton apologist can dare, after the victim cult sponsored by both the president and the First Lady, to ridicule the idea of “conspiracy,” vast or otherwise. Second, the bombings helped to raise Clinton’s poll numbers and to keep them high, and who will say that this is not a permanent White House concern? Third, the subject was temporarily changed from Clinton’s thing to Clinton’s face, and doubtless that came as some species of relief. But now we understand what in November was a mystery. A much less questionable air strike was canceled because, at that time, Clinton needed to keep an “option” in his breast pocket.
On January 6, two weeks after I spoke to Scott Ritter, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan’s office angrily announced that, under Richard Butler’s leadership, UNSCOM had in effect become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Clinton administration. The specific disclosure concerned the organization’s spying activities, which had not been revealed to the UN. But Ritter’s essential point about UNSCOM’s and Butler’s subservient client role was also underscored. This introduces two more canines—the UN inspectors being metamorphosed from watchdogs into lapdogs.
The staged bombing of Iraq in December was in reality the mother of all pinpricks. It was even explained that nerve-gas sites had not been hit, lest the gas be released. (Odd that this didn’t apply in the case of the El Shifa plant, which is located in a suburb of Khartoum.) The Saddam Hussein regime survived with contemptuous ease, while its civilian hostages suffered yet again. During the prematurely triumphant official briefings from Washington, a new bureaucratic euphemism made its appearance. We were incessantly told that Iraq’s capacities were being “degraded.” This is not much of a target to set oneself, and it also leads to facile claims of success, since every bomb that falls has by definition a “degrading” effect on the system or the society. By acting and speaking as he did, not just in August but also in December, Clinton opened himself, and the United States, to a charge of which a serious country cannot afford even to be suspected. The tin pots and yahoos of Khartoum and Kabul and Baghdad are micro-megalomaniacs who think of their banana republics as potential superpowers. It took this president to “degrade” a superpower into a potential banana republic.
So overwhelming was the evidence in the case of the Sudanese atrocity that by January 1999 it had become a serious embarrassment to the Clinton administration. The true owner of the El Shifa plant, a well-known Sudanese entrepreneur named Saleh Idris, approached Dr. Thomas Tullius, head of the chemistry department at Boston University, and asked him to conduct a forensic examination of the site. Samples taken from all levels, and submitted to three different laboratories in different world capitals, yielded the same result. There were no traces of any kind of toxicity, or indeed of anything but standard pharmaceutical material. Armed with this and other evidence, Mr. Idris demanded compensation for his destroyed property and initiated proceedings for a lawsuit. His case in Washington was taken up by the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld—perhaps best known for the prominence with which Vernon Jordan adorns its board of partners.
As a capitalist and holder of private property, Mr. Idris was always likely to receive due consideration if he was prepared to hire the sorts of help that are understood in the Clintonoid world of soft money and discreet law firms. The worker killed at the plant, the workers whose livelihood depended upon it, and those further down the stream whose analgesics and antibiotics never arrived, and whose names are not recorded, will not be present when the recompenses are agreed. They were expendable objects of Clinton’s ruthless vanity.
Note
On 27 October 1999, the New York Times finally published an entire page of reportage, under the byline of James Risen, disclosing extensive official misgiving about the Al-Shifa atrocity. Under the subheading “After the Attack, Albright and Top Aide Killed Critical Report,” it was revealed that a report from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which cast serious doubt on any connection between the plant and either bin Laden or the manufacture of chemical weapons, had been suppressed by Ms. Albright and her Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering. Several highly placed diplomatic and intelligence chieftains were quoted by name as sharing in the view that Al-Shifa was not a legitimate target. The New York Times did not, however, see fit to ask what the urgency had been, or to discompose its readers by mentioning what else had been on the presidential mind that week.
SIX
Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?
Some years ago, after the disappearance of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwirner in Mississippi, some friends of mine were dragging the rivers for their bodies. This one wasn’t Schwirner. This one wasn’t Goodman. This one wasn’t Chaney. Then, as Dave Dennis tells it, “It suddenly struck us—what difference did it make that it wasn’t them? What are these bodies doing in the river?”
That was nineteen years ago. The questions has not been answered, and I dare you to go digging in the bayou.
—James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985
On 14 December 1999, quite uncarried by the networks (though it was filmed and televised locally) and almost unreported in the so-called
“pencil press” or print media, there occurred the following astonishing moment. Vice President Albert Gore Jr. was holding a “town meeting” in Derry, New Hampshire, when a woman named Katherine Prudhomme stood up to ask:
When Juanita Broaddrick made the claim, which I found to be quite credible, that she was raped by Bill Clinton, did that change your opinion about him being one of the best presidents in history? And do you believe Juanita Broaddrick’s claim? And what did you tell your son about this?
THE VICE PRESIDENT (with a nervous giggle): Well, I don’t know what to make of her claim, because I don’t know how to evaluate that story, I really don’t.
MS. PRUDHOMME Did you see the interview?
THE VICE PRESIDENT No, I didn’t see the interview. No. Uh-uh.
MS. PRUDHOMME I’m very surprised that you didn’t watch the interview.
THE VICE PRESIDENT Well, which show was it on?
MS. PRUDHOMME ABC, I believe.
THE VICE PRESIDENT I didn’t see it. There have been so many personal allegations and such a non-stop series of attacks, I guess I’m like a lot of people in that I think enough is enough. I do not know how to evaluate each one of these individual stories. I just don’t know. I would never violate the privacy of my communication with one of my children, a member of my family, as for that part of your question. But—
MS. PRUDHOMME So you didn’t believe Juanita Broaddrick’s claim?
THE VICE PRESIDENT No I didn’t say that. I said I don’t know how to evaluate that, and I didn’t see the interview. But I must say something else to you about this. Why don’t you just stand back up; I’d like to look you in the eye. I think that whatever mistakes [Clinton] made in his personal life are in the minds of most Americans balanced against what he has done in his public life as president. My philosophy, since you asked about my religious faith, I’m taught in my religious tradition to hate the sin and love the sinner. I’m taught that all of us are heir to the mistakes that—are prone to the mistakes that flesh is heir to. And I think that, in judging his performance as a president, I think that most people are anxious to stop talking about all the personal attacks against him. And trying to sort out all of the allegations, and want to, instead, move on and focus on the future. Now I’ll say this to you, he is my friend, and that friendship is important, and if you’ve ever had a friend who made a serious mistake and then you repaired the friendship and moved on, then you know what that relationship has been like for me.
Secondly, I felt the same disappointment and anger at him during the period when all this was going on that most people did. You may have felt a different kind of emotion, I don’t know. I sense that maybe you did. I certainly felt what most Americans did.
Third, I have been involved in a lot of battles where he and I have fought together on behalf of the American people, and I think we’ve made a good, positive difference for this country.
Number four, I’m running for president on my own. I want to take my own values of faith and family to the presidency, and I want you to evaluate me on the basis of who I am and what you believe I can do for this country as president. Thank you.
And thank you, too, Mr. Vice President. Innumerable grotesqueries strike the eye, even as it glides over this inert expanse of boilerplate evasion and unction. Mr. Gore is evidently seeking to identify himself painlessly with “most” (four repetitions) of the public. Yet he also feels a vague need to assert courage and principle and thus asks his lone lady questioner (who has properly resumed her seat) to stand up and be looked in the eye. Such gallantry! He then tells her that “since you asked about my religious faith”—which she had not—she is entitled to some pieties, in which he proceeds to misremember Hamlet rather than the Sermon on the Mount.
But all of this is paltry detail when set against the one arresting, flabbergasting, inescapable realization. For the first time in American history, a sitting Vice President has been asked whether or not there is a rapist in the Oval Office. A Vice President with “access” to boot, and a likely nominee for the same high position. A Vice President who has described the incumbent as a close friend. And he replies, at inhuman length, that he doesn’t really know! The despicable euphemisms he deploys only serve to emphasize the echoing moral emptiness: if Clinton made the “mistake” with Ms. Broaddrick that the lady questioner alleges, it was an intervention in her “personal life,” not his. This is where we live now, in the room-temperature ethics of the 2000 election. But more astonishing still is what is not said. In the course of a lengthy, drivelling, and alternately obsequious and blustering response, the President’s eight-year understudy, close colleague, self-confessed friend, and would-be successor will not say that he disbelieves this foulest of all allegations. He twice mumbles that he cannot “evaluate” the charge of rape. Most of the male readers of this article, I hope and believe, would expect even their nodding acquaintances to do better than that for them. The question of “which show was it on?” is, in the circumstances, rather beside the point. Most politicians in any case either do watch NBC’s Dateline (Ms. Prudhomme was in error about the network) or have their researchers watch it for them. It’s a popular and respected and well-produced show. “Most Americans” who did watch it, in March 1999, concluded that Juanita Broaddrick was unlikely to be lying. Mr. Gore must have read at least that much in the press; his arranging to be adequately uninformed about the story—his positively freakish lack of curiosity—must therefore have taken him some trouble. An open mind need not be an empty mind—though in some cases one is compelled to wonder.
And one can often tell a good deal from an initial reaction, in which the affectation of innocence is present, yet present in such a way as to arouse or confirm suspicion. Take the following excerpt from Roger Morris’s book Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, published in 1996. On page 238 appears the following story:
A young woman lawyer in Little Rock claimed that she was accosted by Clinton when he was attorney general and that when she recoiled he forced himself on her, biting and bruising her. Deeply affected by the assault, the woman decided to keep it all quiet for the sake of her hardwon career and that of her husband. When the husband later saw Clinton at the 1980 Democratic Convention, he delivered a warning. “If you ever approach her,” he told the governor, “I’ll kill you.” Not even seeing fit to deny the incident, Bill Clinton sheepishly apologized and duly promised never to bother her again.
Roger Morris, who resigned from the National Security Council in protest at the Vietnam war, and who has since authored an acclaimed and garlanded critical biography of Richard Nixon, is not from the ranks of the traditional Clinton-haters or right-wing sleuths. (Not that one would exactly relish being called a Clinton-lover, either.) He invites us to notice what Clinton did not say when accosted. Most male readers of these pages, I again hope and trust, would react differently if approached by an irate man and threatened with deadly force if they so much as approached his wife again. Normal, human reaction? “I don’t know what you’re talking about” or “Are you sure you know who you’re addressing?” Clinton reaction: “OK, OK, I’ll stay away from her…”
I’ve talked to Morris at length about the incident, and he agreed to relay messages to and from the couple concerned, to go over his real-time notes with me, to put his own reputation behind the story and to do everything, in short, except reveal the identity of the woman. (Keep your eye on that last point, which will recur.) Here’s what happened. In the summer of 1993 he had been commissioned by Henry Holt, one of America’s most liberal publishers, to do a book on Clinton’s first hundred days:
I went down to Little Rock and started cold: most of my friends were liberal lawyers from Common Cause and I started with the local contacts they gave me. A young attorney from Hot Springs took me aside one evening and said that, for all the jokes and rumors about Clinton’s sex life, not all the encounters had been consensual. He gave me the name of one young woman in particular. When I called her at her offic
e she stonewalled me completely but then her husband telephoned me at the Camelot Hotel and said: “We’ll talk; but it’s off the record.”
At that time, Arkansas had a freshly-anointed President to boast of; the well-to-do in Little Rock were not anxious to be making disagreeable waves. Morris went to a family home in the upscale part of the town and found two prosperous and well-educated lawyers, the woman from Arkansas and the husband from a neighboring Southern state.
She was still frightened while he, I would say, was still furious. The incident had occurred about the time when they were getting married, and they’d since had children. From the photos on the mantelpiece and around the place, I could see that they were well-connected locally, and they talked as if social as well as family embarrassment might be involved in any publicity. I thought they might be taking themselves much too seriously; even over-dramatizing things. And I also thought—come on. Clinton may be sleazy but he’s not an ogre for Christ’s sake.
Morris asked the woman the mandatory questions: Did he think you were coming on to him? Were there mixed signals? Was this just a bad date, or a misunderstanding? However, the woman later called him and arranged to meet in a roadhouse barbeque joint on the far outskirts of town. She still wished, she said, that no one had ever found out. But she’d had to tell one or two people the following: