WHILE the White House strongly denies that electoral considerations had any bearing on President Clinton's decision to launch missile attacks on Iraq, his action has boosted his standing and damaged the campaign of his opponent, Mr Bob Dole.
The White House protestations of absolute purity of intention are less convincing in view of a statement by a French foreign ministry spokesman quoted in the Washington Post. Referring to a telephone conversation last Monday between Mr Clinton and President Chirac, the spokesman said, that under the circumstances of the US presidential election campaign, "France understood Mr Clinton's "motives" in wanting military force to be used against President Saddam Hussein.
Mr Clinton "referred to those political pressures in his conversation with Chirac, according to a French official," the Post reported. "This was a conversation between good friends," the French official said.
Mr Dole may well suspect that the election had a bearing on Mr Clinton's ordering of missile strikes hundreds of miles away from the Iraqi attacks on Kurds in the north, but he has to support the commander in chief once US service personnel are in action.
This is a blow to the Dole electoral strategy, part of which was to depict Mr Clinton as inexperienced in foreign affairs and invite comparisons with the second World War veteran and his long record.
Until the missiles were launched, Mr Dole and his foreign policy adviser, Senator John McCain of Arizona, were hammering away at the President's "weak leadership" over the gathering Iraqi crisis and his "photo-op foreign policy".
Suddenly, Mr Dole and Senator McCain are "standing four square behind our men and women in uniform" and announcing that they will wait until the Iraqi crisis is over before making foreign policy an election issue.
In addition, the media have had a closer look at Mr Dole's own attitudes towards Mr Saddam and Iraq over the years, and the record is not glorious.
As Senate minority leader, Mr Dole met Mr Saddam in April, 1990, four months before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and gave a sympathetic hearing to his complaints that Iraq was being described as a "police state" in the US media. Mr Dole told the Washington Post after the meeting that "there might be a chance to bring this guy around."
In July 1990, when the House and the Senate voted to impose economic sanctions against Iraq following reports of the gassing of 6,000 Kurds, Mr Dole was one of only 16 senators opposing the sanctions because he thought they would hurt Kansas farmers. But his colleague from Kansas, Senator Nancy Kassebaum, voted for the sanctions, saying: "There comes a time when we have to stand up and be counted."
Editorial comment in the national newspapers is generally favourable to President Clinton's action.
The New York Times says that "so far, Mr Clinton has handled the quicksilver of Saddam Hussein with the right mix of American power and restraint."
The Washington Post writes that "an American election is not the easiest time to get it straight and not the moment of maximum trustworthiness on the part of the politicians involved. But a Gulf leadership is required of the United States, and Mr Clinton, who was slow in recognising the crisis that was shaping up in northern Iraq, at last seems to have started playing it."
The Wall Street Journal, under the heading "Where are the allies?" says that "it is hard to face down the bullies of the world, let alone give force to UN mandates, without any help from your friends. And if the US is now all alone, we fear that we may all be soon facing an increasingly lawless world."