WASHINGTON -- If you want to understand how poisoned the atmosphere has become in Washington, you have only to consider the case of the Chinese spying that is now boiling into a major controversy.

On the face of it, the Republicans in Congress would seem to have a point when they complain that the Clinton administration has been slow to take corrective action after discovering that China has benefited from leaks of nuclear warfare technology from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The Department of Energy finally has fired an employee of the laboratory who failed lie detector tests.

But the partisan lines have been so sharply drawn between the White House and Congress that you have to ask yourself whether the accusation of "lax security" -- the term used by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby of Alabama -- is a sound judgment or just another attack driven by the Republican obsession with cutting down President Clinton.

Or, alternatively, might the at- Richardson tack on the administration be a diversionary tactic to turn attention away from the fact that the nuclear secrets were stolen in the mid-1980s while Ronald Reagan and the Republicans were in charge of the laboratory? As Bill Richardson, the energy secretary, observed, there is plenty of blame to go around in this case.

It is quite possible, of course, that the Republicans are not acting out of any political motives at all. But the implacable hostility they have shown toward Mr. Clinton does make you wonder.

The other side of the coin is no better. The White House is denying the charges of inordinate delays since the leak of the sensitive data came to the administration's attention almost three years ago. But considering Mr. Clinton's performance over the past year or so, can the president be believed? Lott The answer is not necessarily.

So we have a lovely situation in which, for good reason, the motives of the Republicans and the veracity of the Democrats are in question.

There is all sorts of political irony in the situation. The Republicans are complaining that Mr. Clinton has dragged his feet because he didn't want to risk his policy of engagement with China. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott called it an "example of where the administration is more interested in engagement than [in] what's happening in that engagement."

This line of attack sounds very much like the one candidate Clinton used in 1992 to attack the Republican president, George Bush, for kowtowing to the Chinese on human rights even after Tiananmen Square. Mr. Bush claimed he had a special relationship with the Chinese leaders because of his service as a special envoy to Beijing in the 1970s. But it looked like a case of a president trying to protect the opening of China as a vast new market for U.S. business.

In fact, what is clear by now is that the United States policy toward China is being driven by practical and strategic concerns without regard to which party holds the White House.

Ordinarily, there would be little reason to believe there is much political resonance in an issue such as the theft of nuclear technology almost 15 years ago. But there is a political context that makes anything to do with China especially sensitive.

There is, for example, the Justice Department investigation of allegations that the Chinese tried to put large sums of money into the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign in an attempt to buy favorable treatment from the administration.

There is also a congressional inquiry into whether some U.S. technology companies made heavy campaign contributions, hoping to get export licenses for technology the Chinese needed for their missile program.

So it is fair to say that there would be reasons for suspicion even under the best circumstances. But in this case, the atmosphere is so toxic that it is difficult if not impossible to make reasonable judgments about the facts of the case.

This is part of the price the country is paying for the year of preoccupation with Monica Lewinsky, the president's evolving story about his relationship with her and the zealous Republican campaign to force him out of office.

We may reach a point at which disagreements can be taken at face value, but it won't happen in this administration.

Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover write from the Washington Bureau.

Pub Date: 3/10/99