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When you’re President of the United States, you’re also the Commander-in-Chief
of the US armed forces. That’s not a role that has been altogether comfortable
for Bill Clinton. After all, he never served in the military, opposed the
Vietnam War and did what he could to avoid the draft as a young man.

So as President, Clinton has seized any opportunity to reassure the
public about his readiness for military leadership, and to reassure the
men and women he commands that he’s on their side. The latest example of
his urgent need to please is the decision to award disability compensation
to Gulf War veterans suffering from a newly named ailment called Gulf War
syndrome. No one knows exactly what this syndrome is, and scientists have
no idea what causes it. But veterans who can prove they have it will soon
be getting disability payments.

Some 700 000 troops served in the Persian Gulf region in 1990 and 1991.
So far, nearly 20 000 have complained of a variety of symptoms, including
fatigue, muscle and joint pain, skin rash, loss of memory, headache, shortness
of breath and gastrointestinal and respiratory problems. Sometimes these
problems are so severe that the veterans are confined to wheelchairs and
unable to work.

A panel convened by the National Institutes of Health to study Gulf
War syndrome readily acknowledged that many troops in the Gulf were exposed
to potentially toxic substances: fumes and smoke from oil wells, pesticides,
diesel fumes, even depleted uranium found in some weapons and armour. But
the panel concluded that ‘no one disease or syndrome has been identified
as the sole cause of these symptoms being experienced by Gulf War veterans’.
The panel recommended more research to find the epidemiological smoking
gun that would tie these cases together.

But the cabinet secretary who looks after the Department of Veteran
Affairs, Jesse Brown, decided he didn’t have time to wait for the scientists.
On 9 June, he told a Congressional committee that the Clinton administration
supported legislation to allow paying disability compensation. Brown said
the administration had learnt a lesson from Agent Orange, the defoliant
used in Vietnam, about the dangers of waiting for scientists to make up
their minds. ‘We do not want a repeat of the mistakes of the past,’ said
Brown. ‘It took in some cases twenty years for veterans to get compensated
because the scientific community could not make up their mind on whether
or not there was any relationship to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, soft-tissue
sarcoma, chloracne, multiple myeloma and respiratory cancers and exposure
to Agent Orange and herbicides.’ Brown says that it’s now clear that Agent
Orange does cause all those problems.

But even on Agent Orange, Brown parts company with many scientists.
According to a report from the Institute of Medicine last year, there may
be a link between some of the medical problems Brown mentions and service
in Vietnam, but adds that ‘it is not possible to quantify the degree of
risk likely to be experienced by veterans because of their exposure to herbicides
in Vietnam’.

Since those finicky scientists still aren’t sure about Agent Orange,
and they probably never will be sure about Gulf War syndrome, Clinton has
decided it’s more important to win veterans’ support – and votes – than
to impress scientists But in an attempt to please everybody, he has called
for more research, too.

* * *

Washington loves euphemisms. Out goes ‘new taxes’, in comes ‘new revenue
mechanisms’. It’s not ‘deficit spending’, but ‘investing in the future’.
And people don’t say ‘no’, but ‘I’ll get back to you’.

The latest euphemism is ‘pause’, and it has research universities mighty
annoyed. ‘Pause’ is a scheme dreamt up by the Clinton administration to
save on the overheads it pays universities for conducting research. If a
researcher gets a grant for $100 000, the university where she or he works
will get approximately $35 000 in what are called indirect costs to pay
for things like janitorial services, utility bills, and a share of the university’s
administrative costs for handling the grant.

Each year, the government doles out about $4 billion in indirect costs,
and it has been rising steadily as a percentage of total research costs.
The idea was to freeze indirect cost payments for one year, or to put it
more gently, initiate a pause in the increases thereby saving about $150
million. The enraged universities have launched an energetic lobbying effort,
and it now looks as though they may have convinced Congress to kill the
proposed freeze, or in Washington terms, to defer the pause.