First we had It Takes a Village. Then there was
Living History. Now we have Against All Enemies.
Like the first, it was not written by Hillary Clinton and, like the
second, it is revisionist history at its worst.
Mr. Clarke — former White House terrorism “czar” during the era
of al-Qaeda’s first round of attacks on America — is doing his
best to sink President Bush. If you listened to Clarke’s testimony
to the 9-11 Commission this week, you would have heard that Mr.
Bush came into office and — with the Wolfowitz snarling at the
White House door — ignored al-Qaeda and everything the smartest
people (meaning Clarke) were saying. According to Clarke, by
deposing Saddam Mr. Bush only made the world a more dangerous
place. Clarke wants us to believe that if only Mr. Bush had chosen
him instead of Condi Rice for National Security Advisor, if only
Mr. Bush had done what Clarke had said instantly, and every time,
maybe — just maybe — we would have been spared the 9-11 attacks.
Nonsense.
Clarke was in the White House for eight years, all through the
Clinton administration’s failures and now wants the world to ignore
that track record. His major accomplishment was a completely
useless strategy on cyber-terrorism.
All you need to know about Clarke is that the release of his new
Bush-bashing book Against All Enemies happened the day
before his melodramatic testimony. I’m sure it was a coincidence
that the book release was accelerated by a month — as Tim Russert
noted on Meet the Press — to appear in bookstores in time
for his testimony.
Clarke began by apologizing to the families of 9-11 victims for
his failure to stop the attacks. All he lacked was the
trembling lower lip. He grandstanded, putting himself in the place
of the government of the United States, of which he wants the world
to believe he should have been in charge. His arguments are not
only partisan but dishonest. He famously briefed reporters in
August 2002 about the efforts of the Bush administration to fight
terrorism and said, at length, that the Bush administration was
working hard to change and improve anti-terrorist actions,
including quintupling the covert action budget for the CIA. Now he
says that he disagreed with what he said then. On Meet the
Press, he said that he had to do that or resign, and chose to
spin because — he implied — he, Clarke the omniscient, was just
too important to the anti-terror effort to leave it in the hands of
others. Read the soon-to-be unclassified Clarke testimony of two
years ago — and the already-available 9-11 Commission staff report
for the details.
Clarke will sell a lot of books as a result of this publicity
exercise. He will be hired by some network as a terrorism “expert”
and be in our faces through the election. That alone makes it
important to understand what he is saying, and why it is so
terribly wrong.
THE MOST IMPORTANT CHARGE Clarke makes — and the one that is
blatantly partisan — is that by deciding to topple Saddam, Mr.
Bush made the world a more dangerous place. He said on Meet the
Press that America is more hated now in the Arab world than it
was before, and that by removing Saddam, we have made it harder to
gain the trust of the Arab world. He also said that the war in Iraq
weakened the war against terrorism by angering the Arab world and
by taking needed resources away from the war against al-Qaeda.
That’s his principal position, and it is the most demonstrably
wrong one he took, which is saying quite a lot.
If Clarke is to be believed, why would 9-11 have happened? If
our diplomacy and foreign aid were successful, why would terrorists
have killed thousands of American that day? Had we stayed out of
Iraq, and left the job of persuading the Arab nations to help fight
terrorism to the diplomats, our Clinton-era posture in the Middle
East would have remained unchanged and unsuccessful. The principal
development in the Middle East in the Iraq campaign is the
demonstration to the despots and religious thugocracies there that
we will act decisively to stop their involvement in terrorism.
Though most of those nations — particularly Iran — still don’t
believe we will do to them what we did to Saddam, there is a signal
of a change in their thinking. Does anyone seriously believe that
Muammar Qaddafi would have surrendered his nuclear weapons program
if he was unconcerned about being next on Uncle Sam’s list?
Clarke still doesn’t understand that we cannot give a rat’s
behind about what the average man on the street in Damascus or
Teheran thinks of us if we want to end the terrorism those nations
produce. We cannot say it often enough: terrorism doesn’t result
from poverty, it isn’t aimed at us because we don’t sing “Kumbaya”
in Arabic often enough. Terrorism is driven by ideology and fueled
by a poisonous interpretation of religion. It’s much more important
to recognize that radical Islam — terrorist Islam — is being
spread by a propaganda line we should well remember.
Those who preach it — whether it’s the Saudi Wahabbism, the
Iranian edition, or one of the others — insist that terrorist
Islam will succeed inevitably, and its seizure of power in any
nation is irreversible. It is, they say, the will of God. More than
thirty years ago, a guy named Leonid Brezhnev said the same thing
about communism, and the Clarkes of that era bought it. At least
until Lech Walesa and some very brave Poles proved the Brezhnev
Doctrine, as it became known, to be utterly false. By overthrowing
communism and establishing democracy, Walesa and his people drove a
stake through the heart of communism. If there is a central
strategy in our war against terror, it must be this: those who
propagandize the inevitability and irreversibility of radical Islam
must be proven wrong just as the Brezhnevites of the 1970s were,
and in the same way.
If we are to succeed in the long-term war against Islamic
terror, we must succeed in the same way, and to the same degree
that the Poles did. We have so far toppled two regimes. But in
neither in Afghanistan nor in Iraq did we topple a radical Islamist
regime in an Arab country. The first time we do this, and manage to
get the people of that nation to establish basic freedoms, we will
have created a new Poland in the Arab world. By doing so, and only
by doing so, can we finally defeat the Brezhnevite Islamists and
bring the era of global terrorism to an end.
TAS Contributing editor Jed Babbin was a deputy
undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and now
often appears as a talking warhead on radio and
television.
