Clark's war comments put valuable trade deal into firing line

By FRAN O'SULLIVAN

The United States does not want "a spitting contest" with New Zealand.

That is the state of play after an extraordinary fortnight in which Prime Minister Helen Clark unwittingly came close to destroying the warm bonds she had cemented with the Bush Administration as her disparaging comments about President George W. Bush and the conduct of the Iraq war intensified.

One Washington source said Clark had to learn "you can't have your souffle and eat it too".

By Monday, Clark was sounding as if that lesson had been learned as she once again ate her words for the news media, this time praising Bush as an "engaging and likeable person".

"It was not my intention to personally offend him in any way," Clark told her post-Cabinet press conference.

For a politician who prides herself on understanding the nuances of international affairs Clark has made several extraordinary miscalculations since the Iraq war started.

Before it, however - for example, during the protracted Security Council negotiations over the disarmament of Saddam Hussein's regime - she exhibited extraordinary self-discipline.

She did not outright condemn New Zealand's traditional allies, the United States, Britain and Australia, for going it alone.

She simply upheld the supremacy of a United Nations mandate against the unilateralist approach.

But once CNN started its wall-to-wall coverage, Clark began her own wall-to-wall comments.

Even before US Secretary of State Colin Powell had begun rounding up international assistance for the post-Saddam era, Clark was making it clear New Zealand would not contribute personnel to a US-organised peace-keeping force.

The war would not have happened if Al Gore had been elected president, she said.

The "shock and awe" war did not appear to be going to plan, the war-gaming done beforehand had expected less resistance. There was more.

It may have all been - and still is - "bleeding obvious" to Clark.

But in Washington, the Prime Minister had strayed on to the battlefield - at the very time New Zealand was pushing its cause for a free trade deal with the world's largest consumer nation.

US Trade Representative Bob Zoellick has asked Congress to tell him whether New Zealand should be patched into the deal his team is negotiating with Australia.

There have been warm responses on Capitol Hill.

But in Washington they talk reputational capital.

Not New Zealand's reputation, or Helen Clark's, but the reputation of influential Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and others from both sides of the House who signed a letter asking Bush to start negotiations on a trade deal for New Zealand.

That letter was delivered to the President within hours of Clark's Gore comment.

Also endangered was the reputational capital of New Zealand's lobbying team - Ambassador John Wood, who is spearheading the campaign for a free trade agreement, Peter Madigan, who is New Zealand business's lobbyist on Capitol Hill, and Fred Benson, president of the United States-New Zealand Council, who has built an impressive list of US companies to back New Zealand's cause.

Clark's timing astonished the well-connected Washington team.

Madigan, a principal in one of Washington's most-respected bi-partisan lobbying firms, Griffin, Johnson, Dover & Stewart, risked being offside by backing a critic of a nation at war.

Benson, a former Army colonel who is personally connected to the Administration's two primary sparring partners, Colin Powell and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, issued smoothing statements to National Radio.

Others, such as billionaire Julian Robertson, who had secured Frist's backing, also had their reputations on the line.

Robertson, founder of the Tiger Fund in New York, spends several months in New Zealand each year at his Kauri Cliffs golf course.

The staunch Republican admires Clark's brilliance, has opened doors to some of Bush's key White House advisers for New Zealand and had considered the free trade agreement a done deal.

Others like Craig Heatley - a friend of US Ambassador Charles Swindells - who now lives for much of the time in America were incensed.

Heatley drafted an article for the Sunday Star-Times to say not all New Zealand businessmen were against the war. He has been a donor for centre-right parties and was careful not to attack Clark personally.

These men were at the centre of a small group of wealthy businessmen who were pulling connections to support New Zealand and helping with fund-raising for the lobbying bills.

Phone lines were running hot along the Washington beltway.

When the rebuke from the US Embassy in Wellington came, it was sharp.

But Clark's toes were firmly dug in. She could not understand the fuss.

The timelog shows the extent of her miscalculation.

On Wednesday, Clark was still in full battle cry.

Interviewed in Auckland for this series, Clark was clearly irked by the embassy's comment that her statements "were regrettable."

What she was trying to say was this:

"We may be living in an age when, more than ever before, the personalities, inclinations and interests of leaders do make a difference.

"And in that respect it's likely that this wouldn't have been handled the same way if Al Gore was president - but who knows.

"That was the context. But they have taken it completely the wrong way.

"What puzzles me about it is that given George Bush is very committed to the war, one would think he would see as a positive for himself that he had handled it differently from his opponents.

"So I'm really quite puzzled as to why offence would be taken.

"I also don't think they appreciate that in a micro-democracy like this there is much more interaction between politicians and the media.

"I don't have the luxury of a once a month standup on the White House lawn. Life isn't like that.

"People do want to hear what their leaders think. If people are getting sensitive about the bleeding realities, then they are being hyper-sensitive."

Asked if she had since been able to straighten out her message with the US, Clark said there had "been traffic at both ends".

"But from our point of view, we're not happy about them jumping into print either.

"It's quite unacceptable and what happens when comments made two Mondays ago in their context were just left.

"Then the Sunday Star-Times decides to make a headline and rings a junior or someone somewhere in the system in Washington who then goes off his nut.

"And then you've got US fury and then they comment again yesterday for today's Herald."

Herald inquiries disclose that even before the Sunday Star-Times report, the US Embassy was on the case.

Clark's disparaging comparison with Al Gore had been well-circulated in Washington before she expanded on it for the Sunday Star- Times.

She was still on song in a phone interview with Herald political editor John Armstrong the next day, adding: "I take great exception to any suggestion that New Zealand is ticked off. We're just not going to tolerate that."

From the sidelines that afternoon, Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff staunchly maintained that his leader's comments "were not a big issue".

"I think that as the PM said, both those comments taken in their context were blindingly obvious - they were hardly radical criticisms.

"And compared to what you read in the Herald today to what you read over what's being debated in the American army, I don't think the President, or the Secretary of State, or the Secretary of Defence is going to be overwhelmed by two fairly bland statements coming out of New Zealand compared to the concerns they will have".

Goff said the Government had debated the Iraq issue, but "hadn't gone out of its way to launch diatribes against the Brits, the Aussies or the Americans. That would have been a futile path".

"Helen was simply acting as a political commentator, saying what a lot of other people were saying. It's not as if New Zealand has gone out of its way to be deeply critical of US leaders or anything else ... We simply have a different position."

But by Thursday evening, the ground had shifted. The smokescreen over the developing standoff was lifting.

Clark was learning what it felt like to be on the receiving end of some other blinding realities.

In a frank telephone conversation, Washington Ambassador John Wood related the collateral damage her comments were causing in Washington.

Wood's news was not good.

The Al Gore comment had really upset the Republicans.

Clark got the message that the Administration was hurt.

The Washington team was concerned that some of the big political names who had signed up to New Zealand's cause in the letter to Bush might withdraw their support.

There were further concerns that Madigan might resign as New Zealand business's lobbyist and the issue might spill out to the US blue-chips that had joined Benson's New Zealand Free Trade Coalition.

But underlying this was the deep State Department and National Security Council concern over Clark's comments.

The officials wanted some signs from the Prime Minister that she was prepared to move on.

Clark was given the message that she needed to put the record straight with the Administration and get the row off the front page.

She also should indicate what New Zealand was prepared to commit to the post-war reconstruction effort - and get it out there now, rather than wait for the war to finish.

"When you hit at the President through the Gore thing and then hit at the war plan - which was how it was perceived - those are two 'no-nos'," said one source close to the action.

The White House operatives who had worked to secure Clark her meeting last year with Bush and his team were steamed up.

Reported comments were off-the-wall and personal.

"She's sounding like Syria; there'll be no free trade deal as long as Bush is President."

As Clark later related there was even conjecture that she was positioning herself for the possibility of Bush no longer being in the White House after next year's presidential elections - "the last thing in my mind".


The Warehouse's Stephen Tindall also phoned. As a member of Clark's Growth and Innovation Advisory Board and a man who prides himself on having the Prime Minister's ear, Tindall had been asked by other business leaders to make her aware of their growing angst.

The message sank in.

Clark called John Armstrong the next morning to soften her message for his Weekend Herald column.

She did not want her comments used as a news story, but she did want to get her softened stance out.

There had been a difference of opinion between Wellington and Washington on how to handle Iraq, but it had been expressed at the NZ end in very restrained terms and no offence was intended by the reference to leaders, Armstrong wrote.

Clark said statements of the obvious about wars not going to plan were not intended as reflections on anybody. They were intended as statements of fact.

Offence had been taken, and she was sorry about that.

But stepping up the language to "regrettable" was unnecessary.

That evening Clark called me and revealed that she had since apologised to the Administration.

"I can't do more than say, 'I intended no offence and I apologise for the offence which it obviously has created'," she said .

"It's caused me great distress because I am endeavouring to ensure this relationship stays strong despite this difference of opinion over the war.

"It was the last thing on my mind to create some sort of offence over who was the President and who wasn't."

Ruefully she reflected: "All of us sitting here in New Zealand a long way from Washington probably underestimated the effect that detached and perfectly reasonable comments in their context could have in a capital at war ... That's the long and short of it."

"You don't seek to cause any offence but inadvertently you do.

"I certainly regret that."

But New Zealand's name has now been muddied in Washington's very tight power circles.

There is concern that those with most to lose if the war does not go to plan - Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice - will urge Zoellick not to bother.

Clark had earlier said "there were forces" within the Administration that always wanted to go after Iraq, and September 11 tipped the balance.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz signed a letter to President Bill Clinton from the Project for the New American Century which urged just that.

But Clark's biggest miscalculation was not to consider who else she was impugning when she said the war was not going to plan.

Bush as Commander-in-Chief is a central figure in the war plans that she criticised.

What stings the Washington insiders is that Clark's jaundice was premature.

The weekend her critical comments ran in the Sunday Star Times, Powell was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the United Nations was needed to give a US-British occupation of Iraq "international legtimacy".

If she had held her fire for a few days, instead of getting ahead of her own headlights, the dispute might never have become public.

Damage has been done to some pivotal - and influential - relationships in Washington which have to be rebuilt.

So has Clark killed the trade deal?

Says Benson: "It's been dealt with.

"Let's get it behind us and focus on the thing we both care about - getting a deal done.

Will Clark's comments kill it?

"I don't believe it will - it's just one part of the relationship."

Herald Feature: Iraq war