Starr could yet inflict lethal strikes

President Clinton was having the worst week of his life until the cruise missiles struck in Sudan and Afghanistan

President Clinton was having the worst week of his life until the cruise missiles struck in Sudan and Afghanistan. From being a humiliated, lying, unfaithful President on Monday whom his own Democrats were deserting, he became a stern Commander-in-Chief ordering just retribution on America's enemies.

But even as the missiles were speeding to their targets, Mr Clinton himself was an increasingly vulnerable target for the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, as he brought Ms Monica Lewinsky before the grand jury for a second time. As she gave her version again of her "not appropriate" relationship with the President (to use his own words) Mr Starr was loading new ammunition into his report which will detonate on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks.

But it was still a remarkable turnaround for a President who one day was watched by the nation confessing from the Map Room of the White House to seven months of deceit over his affair with Ms Lewinsky, and three days later was watched in the Oval Office exercising the awesome military might of the most powerful country in the world.

Inevitably, everyone thought of Wag the Dog and how the Hollywood satire portrayed a President threatened by a sex scandal using a phoney war to divert public opinion. But an instant poll shows that for most Americans, but not all, it was an unworthy thought.

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Some 58 per cent said President Clinton had ordered the attacks "solely because he felt it was in the best interests of the country". And 36 per cent said it was "in part to divert attention from the Monica Lewinsky affair".

Mr Starr himself was asked by journalists if he had seen Wag the Dog. He said, laughing at the implication, he had seen it "but other than that, I'm not going to comment".

In another surreal touch in a crazy week, the bored press corps following the Clintons' vacation on Martha's Vineyard were watching the film when they were summoned to the press centre to be told by the President himself that he had ordered the military strikes.

It is now clear that over the past 10 days the President had been juggling two crises. He was preparing for his testimony to the grand jury, while being advised by his national security staff of the increasing evidence that the Saudi millionaire terrorist organiser, Osama bin Laden, was behind the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.

We now know that as he gave his partial mea culpa address on Monday night the President had already given the go-ahead for the strikes. But in one of the best-kept secrets in Washington, the media had not the slightest indication of the strikes as they concentrated on the unfavourable reaction to the speech.

The largely negative reaction was very worrying for the President. He had obviously hoped his admission of wrongdoing would satisfy Congress and respond to the evident desire of most Americans to end the Starr probing of his sex life.

While public opinion seemed to be giving the President the benefit of the doubt, political and media opinion, not for the first time, was moving fast in the other direction. White House aides were dispatched to Capitol Hill to mend fences with Democrats, furious at being wrong-footed by the President's fingerwagging denials of last January and private assurances.

The aides were told it was now difficult to believe anything the President said. Editorials in newspapers across the country were largely negative about the President's address. There was sharp criticism of the attacks on Mr Starr as hitting the wrong note. The continued attempt by Mr Clinton to maintain that the relationship with Ms Lewinsky was not covered by a legal definition of sexual relations, and so his denial last January was "legally accurate", was met with incredulity and has made him look an ass.

Some senior Republicans like Speaker Newt Gingrich said they would wait for the Starr report to Congress, which they were now assuming would be full of damning evidence of perjury and attempts to obstruct justice. But no attempt was made to hold back other Republican calls for the President's resignation, such as came from the chief whip, Tom Daley.

The Republican National Committee gleefully dug out a young Bill Clinton's reaction to President Nixon's Watergate deceptions. "Now that the President has admitted wrong-doing, he should resign," Mr Clinton demanded back in 1974 in his unsuccessful campaign for a seat in Congress.

The danger for the President now is that he cannot order up military strikes every week, and it is Mr Starr who is preparing a possibly lethal strike. He has found the President's testimony evasive about the exact nature of his sexual relations with Ms Lewinsky, and possibly downright misleading about the frequency of his meetings alone with her.

If Mr Starr can show that the President has lied in his grand jury testimony he could not survive, but the evidence would have to be virtually irrefutable for Democrats to go along with impeachment. Unless there are some more dramatic revelations, it is more likely that the Starr report will amass detailed evidence, which will be persuasive but not absolutely conclusive of perjury.

This is why the unhappiness of Democrats over the President's speech is serious. If they find the Starr report confirms their worst fears as they head into the mid-term elections, the President could find himself under pressure to resign.

It is hard to read at this stage how the Commander-in-Chief role of the end of this week will affect his political fortunes. The strait-laced chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, who would find the whole Monica Lewinsky episode contemptible, still stuck to the traditional position when it comes to foreign policy. "America's differences stop at the water's edge" and the "US's political leadership always has, and always will, stand united in the face of international terrorism".

But the President cannot stay indefinitely at the water's edge, even if he is on the island of Martha's Vineyard for the next week. He will have to brace himself for a Starr report which will give the country details of the Monica Lewinsky affair that up to now have not been leaked, believe it or not.

A senior official was quoted in the Washington Post yesterday as saying the military strikes this week were just the start of "a real war against terrrorism".

For the President it will be a war on two fronts, but firing the cruise missiles will be the easier one.