From the comments
My friend in the comments to Email, I get Email said he hoped I'd get into this from Newsweek (I couldn't find a link):
March 29 issue - It was the day after 9/11, and President Bush, like many Americans, was looking for someone to bomb. Wandering into the White House Situation Room, the president pulled aside Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief of the national-security staff who had been held over from the Clinton years. According to Clarke, Bush asked: was Iraq responsible for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington? Bush wanted the FBI and CIA to hunt for any evidence that pointed to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Clarke recalls that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also looking for a justification to bomb Iraq. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was arguing at a cabinet meeting that Afghanistan, home of Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps, did not offer "enough good targets." "We should do Iraq," Rumsfeld urged.
This is offered to the public as some sort of telling insight. After all, goes the notion (it doesn't actually rise to the level of an argument so I'll call it that), the Iraq War was clearly a mistake and we need to know how we got ourselves into it. And so we've had first, Paul O'Neill and now Richard Clarke, offering pieces of the puzzle they got to see, and drawing grand conclusions. "We got into Iraq", the notion goes, "because it was a fixation from the outset. After all, there are no WMD, so why invade Iraq? It must be a result of this out of whack secret pre-conception, the fundamental truth of which we're only hearing now."
The only problem with the notion is that it ignores everything else about how we got to where we are today. It ignores the 10+ years of history dealing with Iraq. It ignores the evident dangers the Clinton Administration saw in Iraq. It ignores how 9/11 changed U.S. foreign policy. It ignores the total absence of war planning to invade Iraq until mid to late 2002. But it does have the saving grace of impugning the motives of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
In his testimony today Clarke repeated his claims that Bush failed to make Al Qaeda a "top priority". Compare this with what Clarke told reporters in a private briefing in 2002 (via Instapundit). But today Clarke told the 9/11 Commission that he was "spinning" when he said made those comments. And he went on to say that his statements now are as strong as they are because he truly believes the War in Iraq is a bad move in the overall War on Terror.
Well maybe that's so -- I disagree but there are arguments on the other side. But what does that have to do with whether Bush was strong enough against Al Qaeda before 9/11? Was what Clarke said in 2002 an outright lie? If not, how does it square with what's he's saying today, that Al Qaeda was a larger priority for Clinton than for Bush? Maybe that's deep in the transcripts of today's hearing, but I'm not holding my breath. The coverage of his book doesn't reconcile the inconsistencies.
So here we have a guy who is criticizing what happened before 9/11 because he doesn't like what's happened after 9/11, who didn't have the access before 9/11 that he had with the Clinton Administration in any case, and all of it contrary to what he said in 2002. Hey, I think he's on to something!