None of the attacks so far have attempted to counter even a single one of Clarke's facts. Indeed, on one key factual point -- Clarke's Sept. 12 encounter with Bush in the Situation Room, in which Bush pushed him to find Iraq culpable in the attacks -- the Bush people, astonishingly enough, are claiming that Bush "doesn't recall" that meeting. Of course, the fact that Clarke claims to have at least three other eyewitnesses to the meeting has perhaps prevented Bush from simply claiming that Clarke is lying.
No, all of the attacks so far have been about Clarke's character. They can't attack him on facts, so they impugn his motives -- a classic ad hominem response that reveals the depths of their desperation.
Among the most interesting of these arguments are those suggesting that both Clarke and, in the bigger picture, Bill Clinton are even more to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks than George Bush, because they had the previous eight years to do something about al Qaeda and didn't.
Nevermind, of course, the role of certain factions of the right in undermining the Clinton efforts to corral al Qaeda. But if we're going to look at the big picture, then Bush has to be part of that as well.
However, there's no doubt that there is blame to be shared by the Clinton administration, on at least a few important counts.
One of the very real proximate causes of 9/11 was the failure of American intelligence, particularly in its multiple handlings of al Qaeda in the years preceding 2001, and especially its ability to gather intel on the ground, from within al Qaeda. Nearly everyone inside the intelligence services recognizes that this had primarily occurred during the Reagan era, when the CIA was heavily bureaucratized and much of its intel-gathering capacity severely diminished. See, for example, this piece in the Atlantic Monthly by Reuel Marc Gerecht, published just before 9/11, about just this subject:
- The CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which now has hundreds of employees from numerous government agencies, was the creation of Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, an extraordinarily energetic bureaucrat-spook. In less than a year in the mid-1980s Clarridge converted a three-man operation confined to one room with one TV set broadcasting CNN into a staff that rivaled the clandestine service's Near East Division for primacy in counterterrorist operations. Yet the Counterterrorism Center didn't alter the CIA's methods overseas at all. "We didn't really think about the details of operations -- how we would penetrate this or that group," a former senior counterterrorist official says. "Victory for us meant that we stopped [Thomas] Twetten [the chief of the clandestine service's Near East Division] from walking all over us." In my years inside the CIA, I never once heard case officers overseas or back at headquarters discuss the ABCs of a recruitment operation against any Middle Eastern target that took a case officer far off the diplomatic and business-conference circuits. Long-term seeding operations simply didn't occur.
In this sense, Clinton inherited a serious problem -- and even when confronted with various terrorist attacks, did little to attack it. In some regards, he actually condoned and abetted it. Clinton certainly carries some of the weight of 9/11, and he would probably admit as much in a candid moment.
None of this, however, compares to Bush's pre-9/11 record, which -- as Clarke has revealed in brilliant detail -- was unremittingly a litany of failures to comprehend the real threat that terrorism posed to America, and to focus his energies and the public budget on frivolous diversion, most notably a missile-defense system. Bush's downgrading of the counterterrorism chief's role from a Cabinet-level spot to a subjuncture of the Justice Department is only the signal move of a wide range of missteps that Bush took to undermine the nation's counterterrorism efforts.
The point isn't so much that these efforts (or lack thereof) aided or abetted the 9/11 attackers. There's simply no guarantee that even if Bush had done everything right, he could have prevented the attacks (just as probably nothing Clinton could have done would have effectively prevented Oklahoma City).
The point is that Bush's actions beforehand indicated a very poor grasp of the nature of terrorism -- and his actions afterward have continued to demonstrate that serious lack of judgment.
What especially demonstrates this incapacity is Bush's insistence on an almost obsessively military orientation of the "war on terrorism," which has led us into the clearly diversionary Iraq war. This orientation, as I've discussed recently, has many side consequences, not the least of which is that while we can make real logistical inroads against groups like al Qaeda (and we have), at the same time we substantively contribute to the environment that breeds future terrorism.
Moreover, Bush has simultaneously de-emphasized efforts to confront domestic terrorism, which as OKC established is fully capable of inflicting serious harm as well, and which in a 9/11 environment is capable of even more egregious harm in the way that it piggybacks off of international terrorism (see, e.g., the anthrax attacks). That Bush has done so indicates the extent to which the "war on terrorism" waged by Bush is actually, as previously noted, a political public-relations campaign.
In this regard, perhaps the most amusing of the ad hominem attacks on Clarke are those that accuse him of publishing his book, and taking his criticism of Bush public, for "political" reasons: [Snivel snivel] "He's bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign!"
This reminds me of the way Bush supporters smeared the families of 9/11 victims by suggesting they were just playing "partisan politics."
You know, I think it's undeniable that all of these people are fairly up-front about their desire to see Bush lose re-election.
But then, it's also worth keeping in mind that Richard Clarke was a registered Republican in 2000, just as some of the 9/11 family members are former Republicans as well.
These people didn't reach the point that they have simply because of some kind of gamesmanship that treats politics as a football game with points scored and lost by competing sides. They came to their decisions to denounce the Bush administration because they had all seen, in very tangible ways, just how disastrous this presidency has been for the nation. They understand that replacing him is a fundamental step necessary for the country to win the war on terrorism.
It doesn't seem to cross the minds of the conservatives attacking Clarke and other Bush critics that yes, these people have been politicized -- but politicized for very good reasons. It is more than likely, incidentally, that there are a couple million jobless workers out there who have been politicized for similarly good reasons. They've all seen, in their lives and those of everyone around us, how the Bush administration has made life worse for all Americans.
If being united in the desire to see Bush defeated at the polls makes these people partisan politicos, then so be it.
But when it's someone like Richard Clarke, or the families of the terrorists' victims, who is saying so, then the rest of us are going to listen carefully to their reasons.
No comments:
Post a Comment