No Opponent So Fine as Jesse Helms

No matter how bad things get for Bill Clinton--and feting felons at the White House is pretty bad--congressional Republicans can be counted on to do something sufficiently stupid to make the president look good.

What better example than the current spectacle of Republican senators blindly following that world-class clown, Jesse Helms, in his opposition to the Chemical Weapons Convention. This leaves Clinton in the enviable position of defending a treaty to ban chemical weapons worldwide that was first negotiated on our behalf by the Reagan administration, signed by President George Bush and agreed to by 160 heads of states. Helms and his Republican allies are lined up with Iraq and North Korea in lonely opposition to the treaty.

You would think that support for a treaty that bans development, production, stockpiling and use of poison gas would be a no-brainer, but remember that we are dealing with Helms here. As Foreign Affairs Committee chair, Helms has managed to tie up consideration of the treaty for more than three years with a series of bogus objections. And even if it eventually comes up for a vote, it is still questionable whether enough Republicans will break with Helms to provide the two-thirds Senate vote required for treaty ratification.

If the U.S. does not ratify the treaty by April 29, as 70 nations have done, it gives up its right to a seat on the committee that will oversee the treaty’s implementation. Just why treaty enforcement would be better ensured by the absence of U.S. participation has never been explained by the North Carolina senator, who, despite his protestations of patriotism, is determined to hobble the United States in this and most other areas of international relations.

One Helms complaint is that American chemical companies would be subject to inspection by international monitors. Well, sorry, but if they are making poison gas, they should be inspected. But this is another false issue, since chemical industry leaders were intimately involved in drafting the treaty and, led by the Chemical Manufacturers Assn., overwhelmingly support its ratification. As Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen noted recently, “If the United States fails to ratify the CWC, it will be U.S. industry that is penalized with trade sanctions.”

Cohen, as a Republican senator from Maine, once favored the development of binary chemical weapons to counter what he thought was a Soviet threat in that area. But with the Cold War’s end and the agreement of most industrialized nations to destroy their stocks of such weapons, the threat to use chemical weapons comes from rogue regional aggressors. That threat can be deterred by other military means, as was the case in the Gulf War. That is why both Gens. Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell support the CWC treaty ratification.

But Helms will not let go, despite a cat-and-mouse game he played with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright last week. In a disturbing example of the sort of servility Helms expects as a perk of his power, Albright was dragged down to the senator’s state to deliver a lecture at his alma mater. There was even a photo op where they held hands, Albright kissed his jowls and presented Helms with a T-shirt saying, “Someone at the State Department loves me.” Gag me. This is the same Helms, who, two years ago warned the president that he had “better have a bodyguard” if he visited North Carolina.

Helms soon made it clear that he was not about to surrender to reason, no matter the depth of Albright’s fatuous groveling: “Reports of my capitulation have been greatly exaggerated,” he chortled. This week, Helms has scheduled his committee to wheel out the last of the old hawks, including Casper Weinberger, who never met an arms control treaty he didn’t viscerally hate.

Helms will play his game and be supported by the Republicans, who let him keep this all-important committee chair because there is another agenda at work here. The Republican Party still courts the fringe right, which believes that the U.N.’s black helicopters are about to impose a new world order on America. They have always thought that Bush was part of the plot, so why not the chemical weapons treaty he signed?

In short, on a most sensitive and complex issue of foreign policy, Republicans are taking their cues from out-and-out nuts. ‘

Once again, Clinton is left in solid occupation of the center of the political spectrum, a man of reason ever serious in protecting the well-being of the nation. If Clinton didn’t have Helms as an enemy, he’d have to invent him.