Anonymous
Trust Clarke: He's right about Bush
Fri Mar 26 14:53:09 2004
67.1.149.186


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040326/COCLARKE26/TPComment/TopStories
Trust Clarke: He's right about Bush

More than two years after the worst terrorist attack in history,
the President still does not understand the threat we confront, say
security experts IVO DAALDER and JAMES LINDSAY


By IVO DAALDER and JAMES LINDSAY

UPDATED AT 1:49 PM EST Friday, Mar. 26, 2004

This, by any measure, was Richard Clarke's week. The former
counterterrorism czar roiled Washington and the nation with his
accusation that U.S. President George W. Bush had failed to understand
the threat al-Qaeda posed to the United States before Sept. 11, and
bungled the U.S. response afterward. It was a stinging indictment of the
Bush presidency, delivered with stiletto precision. And the impassioned
response from White House showed that it hurt.

Mr. Clarke categorically denounced Mr. Bush's handling of the
terrorist threat. He blamed the President for "continuing to work on
Cold War issues" even as the al-Qaeda danger mounted. He says that
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ignored his memo in January,
2001, "asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a cabinet-level
meeting to deal with the impending al-Qaeda attack."

Mr. Clarke criticized Mr. Bush's response to 9/11 as well. He
painted the President as convinced from the start that Iraq was
responsible. In a damning indictment from a man who spent more than a
decade working the counterterrorism beat, he concluded that everything
Mr. Bush has "done after 9/11 has made us less safe."

Here, we should put our affiliations on the table. Mr. Clarke was
our boss when we served on the Clinton administration's National
Security Council staff. We know him as a committed public servant,
dedicated -- almost to the point of obsession -- to confronting
terrorism. We don't doubt his rendition of events. They come from a man
who has warned of impending doom --and argued for forceful preventive
action -- for many years.

Our testimonial, of course, will not convince Bush partisans, let
alone administration officials. They portray Mr. Clarke as an out-of-the
loop bureaucrat with an axe to grind, a book to peddle and a close
friendship with Rand Beers, Senator John Kerry's chief foreign-policy
adviser.

That sour-grapes argument leaves unmentioned the fact that on
Sept. 11, Ms. Rice asked Mr. Clarke to direct emergency-response efforts
from the White House. It also glosses over the fact that Mr. Clarke was
an ally of Vice-President Dick Cheney and deputy defence secretary Paul
Wolfowitz during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and favoured their call to
march on Baghdad. Also left unmentioned is that Mr. Beers is himself a
veteran of many administrations, and resigned his post as the senior
counterterrorism official on the NSC staff in 2003 to protest what he
saw as Mr. Bush's mishandling of the terrorist threat.

The vehemence with which administration officials have attacked
Mr. Clarke's motives brings to mind the old lawyer's joke: When the
facts are with you, pound the facts. When the facts are against you,
pound the table.

Why are administration officials pounding the table so hard?
Because confirmation of Mr. Clarke's basic accusations comes from none
other than George W. Bush himself.

Take the charge that the Mr. Bush did not make fighting al-Qaeda a
priority before Sept. 11. In late 2001, Mr. Bush told the journalist Bob
Woodward that "there was a significant difference in my attitude after
Sept. 11. I was not on point." Mr. Bush knew Osama bin Laden was a
menace. "But I didn't feel the sense of urgency, and my blood was not
nearly as boiling."

Or take Mr. Clarke's charge that Mr. Bush immediately sought to
link the attacks in New York and Washington to Iraq. According to the
notes of national-security meetings that the White House gave Mr.
Woodward so he could write his book, Bush at War, the President ended an
early debate over how to respond to Sept. 11 by saying, "I believe Iraq
was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now." At a later meeting,
he linked Saddam Hussein to the attacks: "He was probably behind this in
the end."

Those admissions highlight a broader, more troubling point that
Mr. Clarke's accusations raise, which is that Mr. Bush does not
understand the threat we confront. For Mr. Bush and his advisers it is
not al-Qaeda that is the real danger so much as the states that
supposedly support it. Thus, a Defence Department spokesman, responding
to Mr. Clarke's claim that Mr. Wolfowitz did not take the al-Qaeda
terrorist threat seriously, said Mr. Wolfowitz did see al-Qaeda "as a
major threat to U.S. security, the more so because of the state support
it received from the Taliban and because of its possible links to Iraq."

The assumption driving Mr. Bush's war on terrorism is that the
United States can win by targeting rogue states and the tyrants who rule
them. The war in Afghanistan was about ousting the Taliban and denying
al-Qaeda a sanctuary; the Iraq war was about ousting Saddam.

That view of the terrorist threat is deeply flawed, quite apart
from the dubious claims about ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Al-Qaeda
is a transnational network of terrorists, less like a state than like a
non-governmental organization or multinational corporation with multiple
independent franchises. It thrives on an Islamist ideology, and extends
its presence to the far reaches of the globe -- not just in rogue and
failed states, but within the West as well. Its terrorists can strike --
whether in Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, Istanbul, Madrid or New York and
Washington -- without the direct support of states. That is what makes
it so frightening.

Mr. Clarke's charges have stung the Bush administration not just
because of the stature of the accuser, but because at their core, they
say that more than two years after the worst terrorist attack in
history, the President and his advisers still don't get what happened.

That is the true, and alarming, message of this week's debate.

Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay are co-authors of America
Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, which won the 2003
Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations.

• Duke of Bushland,and Queen E`lizard breath`s cuzz! — William the Conquered!, Fri Mar 26 15:49