Who Can Really Say?

Cast Iron Balls

Richard Clarke is back behind the wheel on the NY Times Op-Ed page and remains skilled at the political sideswipe.

Americans owe the 9/11 commission a deep debt for its extensive exposition of the facts surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Yet, because the commission had a goal of creating a unanimous report from a bipartisan group, it softened the edges and left it to the public to draw many conclusions.

Among the obvious truths that were documented but unarticulated were the facts that the Bush administration did little on terrorism before 9/11, and that by invading Iraq the administration has left us less safe as a nation. (Fortunately, opinion polls show that the majority of Americans have already come to these conclusions on their own.)

Actually, no. Pages 198 through 214 of the 9/11 Commission Report summarizes the transition from the Clinton to Bush Administrations, and describes how the new Administration digested the situation. Many players from the Clinton years (including Clarke) remained in place although Condi Rice changed the way they reported up the chain. By March the Bush Administration determined that a broader strategy to eliminate Al Quaeda was preferred to a piecemeal response. These are the documented and articulated findings. Pages 254 through 277 of the Report further document the various threats discerned throughout the summer of 2001 and concludes that we might have had a better outcome if various elements of the national security apparatus had coordinated matters more effectively. Nothing new here, but Clarke claims documented but unarticulated "facts" support a conclusion that Bush's administration did little. Clarke floats this notion, of course, without articulating any documented facts himself.

But Clarke isn't about documenting or articulating anything. He's all about blaming, and it takes cast iron balls for the guy who ran Clinton's anti-terror effort to play that game. This is especially so because Clarke can't say that had the Bush Administration heeded all of his recommendations the 9/11 attacks would have been prevented.

What the commissioners did clearly state was that Iraq had no collaborative relationship with Al Qaeda and no hand in 9/11. They also disclosed that Iran provided support to Al Qaeda, including to some 9/11 hijackers. These two facts may cause many people to conclude that the Bush administration focused on the wrong country. They would be right to think that.

This has been the crux of Clarke's argument all along. Aside from Clarke's practically legalistic approach to evaluating the threat Iraq posed to the US, the inference raised is that we should have invaded Iran instead of Iraq. But that overstates his claim, because he never actually advocates that -- the point exists to undermine the Iraq invasion, not to advocate an invasion of Iran. Were Clarke to support an Iran invasion I could find some respect for him. But Iran is raised simply to knock down the Iraq plan, not as an alternative to it.

And if I may, in skimming various parts of the Report and reading other parts in detail, with the exception of Wolfowitz, I didn't see anyone who advocated that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and plenty of findings to the effect that Bush rejected that notion. Page 335). When Bush sought to justify the war against Iraq he didn't say they were involved. What he did say is that the war is a broad based effort to fight international terrorists who want to destroy us and who would do it if they could get their hands on WMD's. Ousting Saddam was a natural part of the effort to prevent that. Clarke disagrees but his hints that we should have invaded Iran instead are disingenous at best.

There's more -- Clarke reviews some of the Commissions recommendations; he likes some more than others and suggests some of his own. But let's face it. The bug up his butt is Iraq. He says Bush had eyes for Iraq all along and it impaired our intelligence, planning, and policy during the first 8 months of the Bush Administration. The Commisions didn't articulate this because it didn't document it. It's only documented and articulated in the mind of the man in charge of anti-terrorism policy for 8 years during which Al Qaeda grew strong and hit us over and over again. I don't blame Clarke for 9/11 but I'll be damned if the guy who sat in that ineffective chair for 8 years now gets to define who should be blamed for it.

Almost 20 years ago there was a traffic accident at an intersection about 5 miles from my house. A car halted at the stop sign and then entered the intersection, only to be slammed by a car with the right of way. An elderly woman died in the rear seat of the car that first stopped and then entered the intersection. The driver of that car was the son of the dead woman, and he fought the traffic ticket he received for running the stop sign to the point of taking his conviction to an appellate court. In his view, I think, he didn't want to be blamed for causing his mother's death. If nothing else, Richard Clarke seeks much the same exoneration.

Posted by Peter at July 25, 2004 09:33 AM