Richard A. Clarke lived up to his reputation as a Clinton
administration holdover yesterday, relying on Clintonian spin to
explain away baldly contradictory comments. Asked why he told the
press in 2002 that President Bush was “vigorously” addressing the
al Qaeda threat when he is now alleging the very opposite, Clarke
fell back on the double negative, a tell-tale sign of a Washington
weasel, by saying that his comments in 2002 were “not untrue.” He
had been asked to “highlight the positive aspects of what the
administration had done and to minimize the negative aspects of
what the administration had done.…As a special assistant to
the president, one is frequently asked to do that kind of thing.
I’ve done it for several presidents.” A spinning skill, in other
words, he got to hone in the Clinton administration.
Clarke’s testimony began with another Clintonian rhetorical
tactic — the applause-generating apology that frees the apologizer
up to blame everyone but himself. “I failed you,” Clarke said to
the families of 9/11 victims. “I would ask you for your
understanding and forgiveness.” Richard Ben-Veniste was impressed
by this “courageous gesture.” But Clarke quickly made it clear that
in his mind he hadn’t failed at all. “I had all of the
responsibility and none of the authority,” he said, downplaying his
title as Clinton’s terrorism czar. He hadn’t failed anyone, but
many not sufficiently awed by his prescience had failed him.
“People tend to think you are nuts,” he said as he recounted how
his colleagues, some to his face, some “behind my back,” didn’t
heed his calls about the threat from al Qaeda. Policy change
happens slowly in Washington, he said, and only after “body bags”
pile up.
It is ironic that Clarke would emphasize the need for proactive
strategies — striking terrorists before the “body bags” pile up
even if that means the forward-thinking policymaker is considered
“nuts” — when he is dismissing President Bush as nuts for his
proactive toppling of Hussein in Iraq. What Clarke says others have
done to him, he is now doing to Bush. But what if Bush hadn’t
invaded Iraq and Hussein had again attacked American interests?
Would Clarke have written a book saying Bush hadn’t taken that
threat seriously enough, that he should have known that someone who
tried to assassinate a U.S. president would try to attack America
again?
Clarke at once criticizes Bush for passivity and aggression. He
blames him for not pursuing the terrorists and then blames him for
provoking them when he does. It is not clear if Clarke wants to
catch terrorists or understand them. That Bill Clinton turned a
root-causes liberal — Clarke has said we need to understand the
“reasons for terrorism” and figure out why they “hate” us — into a
counterterrorism chief is itself an explanation for America’s soft
security prior to 9/11.
Clarke is not a hardheaded CIA operative, but a former State
Department official with the typical liberal distaste for
aggressive CIA covert operations, the ones which would have
disposed of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. When Bob Kerrey yesterday
said that America should not go back to the “bad old days” of the
CIA, Clarke readily agreed.
In tabulating the reasons for 9/11, Clarke forgot to mention the
bad old days of the 1990s when the CIA director couldn’t even get
an appointment with Clinton. Would Clinton’s CIA director James
Woolsey agree with Clarke that counterterrorism was the Clinton
administration’s highest priority? Woolsey says that he could not
get a single meeting with Clinton during the two years he served as
CIA director. In 1994, when an errant plane crash-landed into the
White House, White House staffers joked it was Woolsey trying to
get an appointment.
Yesterday CIA director George Tenet and Sandy Berger confirmed
this Clintonian atmosphere of security sloth when it came out under
questioning that the CIA had never even been informed by the
Clinton administration that it could assassinate Bin Laden. The
“bad old days” anti-CIA mentality led to such stupidity, yet Clarke
blames the Bush administration for not undoing in about eight
months a mentality the Clinton administration had entrenched for
eight years.
Kerrey and Clarke were in agreement about the “bad old days” of
the CIA and the bad new days of Fox news. Kerrey said Fox had
“violated a serious trust” by reporting the background White House
briefing Clarke gave to reporters in which he praised Bush’s
pre-9/11 approach to Al Qaeda. Clarke nodded appreciatively. Fox
was being quite unfair to Clarke. He would never resort to such low
tactics as reporting White House conversations.
