Over the last several weeks the Iraqi government has refused to permit United States members of a United Nations inspection team to view military installations in the country. The purpose of the inspection was to determine whether Iraq was complying with United Nations Security Council demands on disarmament.
There are understandable reasons why Iraq should refuse such access to US personnel on the United Nations team. The US has massacred tens of thousands of Iraqis in bombing raids since 1991 (allegedly because of the invasion of Kuwait, an invasion which was explicitly given the nod by the then US ambassador to Iraq). The US has also, through its hegemonic control over the UN Security Council, secured the enforcement of sanctions against Iraq for eight years and Iraq's isolation from the rest of the world.
According to the White House, Bill Clinton has been planning yet more bombing raids on Iraq, raids that we now know will result in the killing of innocent civilians. By the standards that we, the United States and most countries apply to acts which result in the foreseeable killing of humans, this constitutes murder.
The deliberate taking of human life is a serious business. By comparison, lying or even committing perjury over illicit sexual affairs is a triviality. And yet the American political system is now transfixed on the triviality and is entirely indifferent to, if not entirely supportive of, the murderous plans which would have resulted (and may yet result) in the killing of more innocent Iraqis.
Even if Bill Clinton is lying through his teeth in his denials of having a sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky and even if he is also lying about not have urged her to commit perjury, in terms of public issues it is a matter essentially of little consequence. There is nothing much at stake in public terms.
So how is it that the President of the United States is brought to the verge of resignation or even impeachment over this affair?
It must have to do with the vulgarisation of public discourse. To a large degree, very little now gets prominence in the mass media that would not appeal to the brain-dead. The media obsessions with the O.J. Simpson and the Louise Woodward cases (and here over the Michelle Rocca case last year), which were essentially circuses, are other examples of this.
The primary reason the Lewinsky affair has achieved such prominence is precisely because of the brain-dead factor. The respected American TV journalist, Sam Donaldson, said on Monday night that there was no other story in the US right now, not the proposed mass murder in Iraq, not the state of the US economy, not the problems of the city ghettos and the continuing racial crisis; nothing beyond whether Bill Clinton had oral sex with a 21-year-old intern.
Yes, there may be some significance in the Lewinsky factor if the stories are true. This would have to do with Bill Clinton's attitude to women and what may be his exploitative treatment of them. But what would this tell us that we did not know already? And how could it begin to compare in significance to the planned mass murder in Iraq?
And, by the way, there is another issue in the international arena which might more legitimately concern Bill Clinton than the planned mass murder in Iraq and might engage the attention of the American public and the world media. It has to do with the continuation of a campaign of genocide in Rwanda and a campaign of double genocide in the other small Great Lakes state of Africa, Burundi. In a little over six weeks in the summer of 1994 the majority Hutu population of Rwanda sought to exterminate all of the 900,000 Tutsi population.
They managed to slaughter about 800,000 of them, men, women and children, in perhaps the worst carnage the world has known in that space of time. Like the rest of the world, Bill Clinton's United States, which is so exercised over disarmament in Iraq, did absolutely nothing. France did intervene towards the end of the genocide, and the effect of that was to offer protection to the main perpetrators of the genocide.
Rwanda was invaded at the time by an army drawn from the Tutsi diaspora that had been driven out of Rwanda over the previous decades. The generals of that army are now in power in Rwanda, and a huge influx of previously displaced Tutsis has returned to Rwanda to replenish the population that had been wiped out.
The main agents of the genocide (who, incidentally, included priests, nuns, doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, civil servants, journalists, broadcasters - it is estimated that almost half of the two million adult Hutu population played some part in the genocide) fled to Zaire (now the Congo).
From there they have sought to complete the genocide and drive out the Tutsis who returned. Tens of thousands of Tutsis have been slaughtered in the years since the genocide officially ended, and several thousand innocent Hutus have been slaughtered in return by the Tutsi army. The slaughter has recently increased again. Thousands of people have been killed in the last two months. The world's media have almost entirely ignored this slaughter.
The American public is not remotely interested, and there is no evidence that it has cost Bill Clinton a thought. Immediately to the south of Rwanda, in Burundi, there has been a double genocide by the Tutsis of the Hutus and vice versa. In the last 10 years well over a quarter of a million people have been killed, mainly Hutus by Tutsis. The Tutsi-dominated army killed the democratically-elected Hutu president of Burundi in 1994, and in 1996 a Tutsi army officer seized power.
In the last few months well over a thousand people have been massacred and again the world's media, the American public and Bill Clinton have not given it a glance. It might be asked what this has to do with the US and Bill Clinton. It has this. The United States now controls the UN Security Council. It has used this power to wage war on Iraq on the pretext of acting in the interests of Iraqi dissidents and of neighbouring states.
By what criteria is what is happening in Rwanda and Burundi any less deserving of attention? And by what criteria is what is happening in these small African states of any less importance to the world's media than the entirely trivial issue of whether Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky and subsequently lied about it and encouraged her to do so, too?
Let's admit it. A spurious significance has been injected into the Lewinsky business (the perjury issue) to justify a prurient indulgence in the minutiae of the sexual allegations. This is no more than the coarsening of the public culture.