Played for a Sucker - 5 March 1999

I hope the name Richard Butler is not a stranger to you. In the never-ending mess and turbulence of American and United Nations relations with Iraq, Mr Butler is as close to a hero as we're likely to find.

He's the Australian who's head of the United Nations Inspection Team that has, for years, gone looking for those lethal needles in the huge haystack of Iraq. Trying, over a barren landscape the size of California, to find and destroy or neutralise nuclear, chemical and germ weapons, above and below ground.

Perhaps even he can't count by now the number of times Saddam's men have told the UN team to pack its bags and get lost.

Last time Saddam made the puzzling proclamation that the next United Nations team must not include any Americans. And this week that puzzle was - that ban - was explained in a way that humiliated the United Nations team, the United Nations Secretary General and most of all the head man Mr Richard Butler himself.

And who was the betrayer? The United States. Which means the Central Intelligence Agency - the CIA. And which can only mean, in the last analysis, the President of the United States.

Saddam Hussein had the gall to announce, last weekend, that the Americans on the UN inspection team had gone way beyond its brief, its mission, by secretly installing taps and transistors and other devices along the way of their supposed inspection route in order to intercept Iraqi intelligence - in fact to do something they are, by the terms of their contract, absolutely forbidden to do: to spy in their own national interest.

While the more innocent of us onlookers - in fact, I think, the great majority of the American public - were impatient to have the president or the head of the CIA come out in hot dudgeon and expose this ghastly accusation as a typical bit of Saddam's lying propaganda. So?

So the administration wriggled and said: "Well, sorry folks but I'm afraid he's right."

In this most wearisome and delicate mission, in which it has been essential for the UN and its team members to behave impeccably, the CIA has revealed what John Le Carré called one of those imbecilities that are committed in the hallowed name of intelligence.

Of course it's given Saddam the most godsent propaganda weapon throughout the Arab world, reinforced the cry in the Western world to relieve or lift sanctions, in spite of our certain knowledge that Saddam has put into storage thousands of tons of precious medical supplies while he deplores, in public, the heartlessness of the UN - of course now of America in particular - for maintaining the sanctions that hurt, not his military, but his people.

I can't think of an honourable or even shrewd way out of this debacle. All I know is that Mr Richard Butler refused to talk to the media on Tuesday after he'd said privately: "I have been played for a sucker." At the moment he must be the bitterest delegate extant in the United Nations.

It makes one, more than one, question the legal or constitutional authority by which the CIA takes on so many secret jobs. Some Senate oversight committee at least might look into this colossal blunder in order to remind the CIA that it's authority to infiltrate - to intervene in anything - is justified only by its primary task, which is: "To provide timely warning of threats to national security or existence."

And then on the heels of this blunder an American air strike accidentally severed an oil pipeline to Turkey. And Turkey's protest on Wednesday gave the cue for the Arab League to turn 180 degrees and insist on an end to the aerial bombing of Iraq.

China came in smartly to say the same thing, and Russia and France in the Security Council are making scolding sounds.

The CIA's boo boo or clanger and what followed has, within one week, left the United States and Britain not the nucleus of the anti-Saddam alliance but the whole of it. Thus Saddam is, in effect, after seven years, declared the winner.

We have been so long saturated in the stew of what, from now on, I'm afraid will be known as Monicagate that by the time Congress reassembled to get back to business it felt and looked like the beginning of a new presidency, like 20 January every four years.

When we see the new members sworn in and then we cut to an interview with the leaders of each party in the House and the Senate, and before their lips begin to move, you can mouth the script: They hope, they say, in the weeks ahead to work together and to work with the president to frame and pass laws that will do credit to the spirit of bipartisan-ship to make the system work the way it was meant to and blah blah blah blah.

These little pledges of working together are, I don't know why, a compulsory ritual. But the party leaders know - and in a month or two every freshman Senator and Congressman or woman will know too - that the system was set up over 200 years ago to see to it that the executive branch of the government - the presidency - and the legislative branch - the Congress - should not work too closely together.

Much of the spirit that fired the men who wrote the Constitution was bred by their memory of the tyranny of kings and the kings' ministers. They wanted, most of all, a system that would foil or block a dictatorship.

In a parliamentary system the prime minister is part of the legislature - they didn't want that, they didn't want a president who, like a prime minister, could appear and tell them what laws were going to be put up and executed.

They wanted a prime minister - a president - who wasn't allowed in the legislature except once a year, where he would come and suggest what laws might be passed - but then the Congress would throw out this one, polish up another, introduce its own laws, and have the final say in which laws would be passed. And the House alone says who gets how much money for what.

Even in the debates over the writing of the Constitution, James Madison was most insistent that the system should provide in the Congress a strong opposition to the president and, inside the Congress, lots of competing interests.

"Healthy government," he said, was about "faction opposing faction, ambition counteracting ambition."

It would mean the president would never have things all his own way. And if the Congress got too cocky and dictatorial then the president should have certain restraining powers like that of the veto over some legislation. Not co-operation but check - double check - was the plan.

Well we shall soon see "faction opposing faction" when they go after the issues everybody's been waiting for the president and the Congress to tackle: the insuring of social security for younger generations, the preservation for the increasing numbers of the aged of Medicare - the sickness payments for the old - and the problem they've started with: how to raise the standard of public education in a country where each of 50 states handles its own educational system?

But for once there is coming up a question of law on which it seems both parties are in rueful agreement. Not about passing a law but abolishing it. And that's the law which Congress passed in 1978 setting up a prosecutor independent of the administration - any administration - when there was a question of misconduct or crime in the executive, the presidential branch of government.

Before 1978 if there was the suspicion of any such serious hanky panky, the president could authorise the attorney general to appoint, from civilian life, an independent prosecutor to make an objective investigation. But this prosecutor could be fired by the president and not only did Mr Nixon fire the special prosecutor who was investigating him, when evidence was coming up in the Watergate affair that might incriminate Mr Nixon, but Mr Nixon also fired his own attorney general.

It sounds like something out of the more corrupt administrations of later Rome. Tiberius appoints Sejanus as his deputy. Sejanus plots to overthrow Tiberius. Caligula, who's ready to liquidate both of them, says: "Aren't people awful?"

Well, when President Nixon resigned, to avoid the certainty of his found guilty in his coming impeachment trial, Congress - both parties - realised that the existing special prosecutor law was a sham. So four years after Nixon's abdication both Republicans and Democrats invented the law we've been going by - a new Special Prosecutor Act giving the prosecutor total independence of either the presidency or the Congress.

"Taking the two parties," as one senator has just said, "from the most noble motives along the unintended path of mutually ensured destruction."

In shorter, more brutal words: Mr Kenneth Starr was so independent of his original brief of anything and anybody that after four years and $40m of public money, of finding nothing wrong, that is to say impeachable, about the scandals he was hired to investigate - the Arkansas land deal, the White House's mysterious possession of hundreds of FBI files on the Republicans, the strange dismissal of the White House travel staff by - it was alleged - Mrs Clinton.

Okay. Then Mr Starr went off on his own, digging into remote cases of adult sexual delinquency on the part of the president - and he found pay dirt.

Now that it's all over, both leaders - indeed a majority of both parties - know and say that Mr Starr's far flung investigation got way out of hand - out of reach.

"Not again," they're saying.

That 1978 Act is due to expire in June and it'll either be killed off or renewed in, they say, a very different - a more wary - form.

Well, doing that will be quite a trick. New law or no law the Congress will still have to find a way of solving - of answering - the oldest Roman question: "Who shall police the policemen?"

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