Cruise missiles won't stop the dangers facing US democracy

NEVER IN the history of the United States has there been a moment like this. A president, fighting impeachment, has decided simultaneously to start a war. The House of Representatives patriotically supports the troops while attempting to remove from office their commander-in-chief. And the man Republicans regard as an untrustworthy draft-dodger has control of the mightiest military machine in the world.

Americans are open-mouthed with bewilderment and concern at the bizarre collision of events. The two problems which have dogged the US throughout the 1990s like toothache - the implacable hostility of Iraq and the persistently scandal-ridden behaviour of its president - have crashed together the week before Christmas.

Citing a "clear and present danger", President Clinton is risking the lives of American servicemen at precisely the time his own political life is most under threat. Forever lucky in his enemies, Mr Clinton's highly partisan opponents are redoubling their efforts to get the world to recognise he is the liar-in-chief, adulterer-in-chief and perjurer-extraordinaire.

Perhaps we should have become used to expecting the impossible. After all, this is a year which began with the revelation that Bill Clinton had oral sex with a 21-year-old intern, but so far has claimed as the biggest political casualty not Mr Clinton but his most outspoken opponent, the sacked House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Gingrich's successor as Speaker, Bob Livingston, has now been forced to admit to adulterous affairs, though he will not resign. As someone who has covered every scandal since Bill Clinton first began to run for the presidency in 1991, and who watched the Reagan administration unravel in the Iran-Contra affair, I have never seen the politicians in Washington so angry with each other or so disconnected from the American people.

Today's expected vote in the House of Representatives does have a precedent. It is the first impeachment since the presidency of Andrew Johnson in 1868, but the domestic drama is now inextricably linked, as Johnson's never was, to an attempt to destroy a foreign leader and reassert American authority in a military adventure. Both Mr Clinton and his political enemies have embarked on breathtakingly risky courses of action without any kind of road-map for how to proceed.

Most Americans regard taking on Saddam Hussein as justified and inevitable. But the timing, as Lawrence Eagleburger, the former Secretary of State, puts it, "smells to high heaven". Of all the hats a president must wear, the one of commander-in-chief has never quite fitted Clinton. For him to assume significant military leadership in the twilight of his presidency is truly extraordinary.

Beyond draft avoidance in Vietnam, everything about the Clinton administration has seemed unmilitary in character, profoundly different from Bush, Reagan or Carter. Most obviously, Clinton is the first president of a new generation, a man whose formative years were not spent in World War Two. While the Bush White House was full of military veterans, President Clinton's team is more like a university common room in which those with military experience are conspicuous by their rarity.

The first week of his administration began with a clash of cultures with the military brass over whether to allow homosexuals to serve in uniform. But whatever their doubts about the character of the commander-in-chief, American servicemen have loyally served him. Ever since the Gulf war ended eight years ago, facing down Saddam Hussein has been America's diplomatic Groundhog Day, the Hollywood movie in which every morning you wake up to the same problems.

With the exception of 1995, there has been a US-Iraq crisis every year since 1990. Two weeks ago a senior Clinton administration official told me to expect another confrontation. He warned that the US would show itself to be on an extremely short fuse. This official, one of a handful who direct national security policy, refused to predict the timing, but agreed that the crisis could come before Christmas. The official said Clinton only decided against bombing Baghdad in November because "you do not shoot a man who has his hands up". But the official also predicted, correctly, that the mission of the UN weapons inspectors was doomed and that the US would be forced to try to do with bombs what the UN had failed to do by inspections - namely degrade Saddam's military capacity. He acknowledged that the American people were tired of perennial High Noon confrontations and wanted the Saddam problem sorted out for good.

What strikes me now as curious about this conversation is that the Clinton official was prepared to brief me, a foreign journalist, extensively, while the president himself failed to prepare the American people. Surprising Saddam is one thing. Surprising America's voters, allies and world opinion is another and adds to the suspicion that this has been partly the War of Clinton's Zipper. Around one in four Americans shares this view, suspecting that the President may have abused his power by ordering the military strike to distract from the impeachment hearings, less a matter of policy than of crude politics.

After all, Clinton did order cruise missile attacks against Sudan and Afghanistan last August, just days after the humiliation of admitting that he had lied for months about Monica Lewinsky. This week's attack may be a coincidence too far. But the far more significant point is that Clinton's lack of credibility is now so damaging that it is impossible to view anything he does except through the prism of his scandals. He could feed the five thousand with a few loaves and fishes and yet a large percentage of Americans would view the miracle as another cynical stunt from their political Houdini. His own survival - which still looks likely but is by no means guaranteed - is of less interest now than the damaged credibility of the American system of government, if impeachment proceedings stretch for months into 1999.

America's democracy is resilient. The republic has survived the Civil War and civil rights, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour and being torn apart by Vietnam. Americans endured the national tragedy of Watergate. They will surely endure the national farce of the Lewinsky scandal. For Nixon it was once a profoundly serious question of what did the President know and when did he know it. For many Americans that has been replaced by the Clinton question of what did the President touch and when did he touch it.

But the collision of war and scandal has now gone to the core of the American political dilemma as the new millennium approaches. Why has America endured 40 years of failed presidencies, a string of one-term inadequates punctuated by the two-term scandal presidencies of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton? Why does this great democracy produce such shabby leaders? Why does the United States export political ideas abroad and yet see fewer and fewer of its own citizens bother to vote at home?

The twilight of the Clinton presidency may not provide the answers to what has gone wrong. But it does provide a clear example. And you can be sure it will prove easier to solve the Saddam problem than the sclerosis within the American political system. The mess in Washington remains the clear and present danger that cruise missiles cannot fix.

Gavin Esler is the author of `The United States of Anger'