By Eqbal Ahmad The head man of the world's sole super-power is up to his ears in muck. Each day more piles on. Yet William Jefferson Clinton will not resign, the Congress shall not impeach him, and his nemesis Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, won't let him stagger out of the filth. The spectacle is unique even for American politics which in recent years alone produced such world class White House serials as Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair. Commentators frequently mention the latter scandals, specially Watergate, but more to underline their contrast with Clinton's predicament. Watergate reflected an institutional crisis, a domestic fall out of the Cold War -- the creation of imperial presidency and its abuse of power, also the chickens of covert operations abroad coming home to roost. Hence it gave rise to reforms -- a campaign-finance legislation was enacted, tighter controls were imposed on intelligence agencies, limits were put on wiretapping of individuals, and the office of special prosecutor was created. A notable exception no one has yet noted: no sanctions were imposed against those illegal, invariably criminal covert operations abroad. Hence the Reagan-Bush decades yielded a rich crop of contra wars and wars of intervention from Afghanistan to Panama, Angola to Nicaragua; the Iran-Contra affair was a direct outcome. With their usual penchant for missing the point, the pundits are arguing now that Clinton's troubles are personal not institutional, that they reflect the failings, if any, of the individual not of the state or society. The argument has caught on; the public as a whole deems Mr Clinton a defective man doing a good job as president, and all is deemed going well within the American political system. To see this crisis as Bill Clinton's personal failing is to miss the malaise it reveals in contemporary American society and politics. From the start Bill Clinton's troubles have reflected a preoccupation on the part of the main players with money, publicity and self.Those were the temptations that brought Jennifer Flower and Paula Corbin Jones out with allegations against him after Clinton came into the White House and his accusers could become pricy celebrities.Somewhat belatedly, Mr Clinton did a public mea culpa about his liaison with Flowers in a sappy enough fashion to have touched the common heart. Paula Jones's damage suit was dismissed by a federal judge in Arkansas on grounds that she had not presented a "tangible evidence of damage," even if the alleged incident which, if true, was "certainly boorish and offensive," wrote Judge Susan Weber Wright. The Paula Jones case has continued nevertheless to haunt Clinton. It was during its hearing that he had denied under oath that he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, then a 20-year-old intern at the White House. Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor, suspected that Clinton had lied under oath, a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison, and pursued his investigation. Enter Linda Tripp, another White House employee burdened with greed of money and fame. Tripp, then 44 years old, was a friend of Monica Lewinsky who often confided in her on the phone about her affair with the President of the United States. Without Lewinsky's knowledge Tripp was taping her friend's conversation. Why? In a literate but largely uneducated society, juicy tales about doings in high places are coveted by the large publishing houses who offer millions in advance to the tellers and their ghosts. Tripp's motive in taping her friend's conversation was a handsome publisher's advance. For now she has been granted immunity from prosecution, appeared before the Grand Jury which will determine the charge against Clinton of perjury, and the tapes of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky are at the special prosecutor's office. Linda Tripp has been pilloried by the media for her role in the affair. She is being portrayed as greedy and unreliable, a betrayer of friendship. She protests vehemently, expressing outrage at the media's double standard. "I am you," she screamed into the television camera the other day, "I am one of you." She had a point. In recent decades the main occupants of the White House and their high level aides -- including convicted offenders like John Ehrlichman, Robert Haldemann and Oliver North and such unconvicted-convicted war criminals as Henry Kissinger -- have made private fortunes by revealing official stories and secrets to which they were privy as public servants. They have been able to do so because some big corporation could make even bigger profits from their misdeeds and betrayals of public trust. Why then hold the miserable Tripp to a higher morality than the much celebrated Oliver and Henry! Lewinsky has been getting better press than any other party to this scandal. This is rather strange because if Clinton is guilty of perjury so is she. She too had denied under oath illicit relations with the President. Now she has obtained from Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, immunity from prosecution in return for telling the truth. Truth or not, she is now telling a different tale than she had told earlier under oath. Also it is Lewinsky who allegedly gave Tripp the "talking point" memo. That document contains instructions given to the prospective witness on what to say and how to lie in a sworn testimony. The quest is to find out if the White House lawyers or Clinton himself had anything to do with the memorandum as it clearly indicates an effort to suppress evidence and obstruct justice which are, of course, criminal offenses carrying longer sentences than for perjury. Then there is the tell tale evening dress belonging to Lewinsky that is presumed to carry the genetic weight of the President of the US. It is currently in the possession of the FBI and undergoing severe DNA testing for presidential semen. The fate of William Jefferson Clinton hangs largely on this piece of dark blue cloth. But two questions arise: what kind of girl will have her mother preserve a sexually soiled dress, and what can be a mother's motive in so sordid an act of memento keeping? There is also a political mystery about Monica's turning into a state witness. The Lewinskys are ardent Zionists. At the beginning one heard from them an ardent desire to protect the President because he was such a good friend of Israel. So what changed that commitment? Could Benyamin Netanyahu's agents have added a twist to Monica's turn-around? The presidency is uniquely an American invention. It is an elected office of which the occupant is at the same time the chief executive, constitutional head of state, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The founding fathers' invested in the president the powers of a monarch, but subjected him to the democratic principle of accountability which was ensured by a complex system of parliamentary and judicial checks and balances. Radical and liberal scholars have noted the erosion of this system following World War II. The exercise of imperial power and the Cold War compelled the emergence of a warfare state in America. A powerful and pricy national security apparatus developed, a large part of which was barely invisible. Its role was global, often covert and seldom kosher. In an environment fraught with imperial interventions and ideologically cultivated Cold War fears, the principle of accountability systematically conceded to presidential power. Arthur Schlesinger Jr, who comes close to being the Democratic Party's official historian, writes in a recent article that "The half century of protracted crisis from Pearl Harbor to the break up of the Soviet Union came close to institutionalising the Imperial Presidency." While surveying Clinton's predicament, Professor Schlesinger is astute in noting that following the Cold War's end a fundamental shift is occurring in the nature of presidential power: "The fall of the Soviet Union completed the revolt against the abuse of presidential power. Because it was the creation of international crisis, the imperial presidency collapsed once that crisis came to an end." One notable fact surrounding the assault on the imperial presidency is that it came so late, a quarter century after Watergate and a decade after Ronald Reagan lied his way out of the Iran-Contra Affair. Another is that the guardians of the state and constitution, not the people at large, appear keen to pin Clinton down. While the American public does not seem to care much either about the peccadilloes in the White House or their president's veracity, the Congress and the Judiciary have been supportive of the independent prosecutor. The courts in particular have dealt presidential power and prerogatives a severe blow. For the first time in American history the court required the secret service men who guard the president to testify before the grand jury. For the first time a sitting president was subpoenaed and has agreed to testify, albeit on video and from the White House, to a grand jury on 17 August 1998. Professor Schlesinger is upset over the excessive zeal shown by Ken Starr, the independent counsel, whose drive to nail Clinton down he compares to Captain Ahab's "quenchless feud" with the White Whale in Herman Melville's American classic, Moby Dick. His Democrat's outrage is understandable; the affair is being accorded a partisan treatment. The Republicans, in Congress and outside, wish Clinton thoroughly discredited; but they do not want to impeach him, for that could mean confronting in the next election a non-discredited presidential incumbent in Albert Gore. A lame duck is what they would like to see in the Oval Office for the next two years. This is petty politics at best. But there is another way to look at the matter: system correction, if that is what it really is, nearly always entails disturbances of one kind or another. It is Clinton's misfortune that he should have been caught at the tail end of a delayed reaction against the Imperial Presidency.
