President Bush’s former counter-terrorism advisor Richard
Clarke, who also served under Presidents Reagan, Bush Senior, and
Clinton, has charged that the current administration was, in
effect, asleep at the wheel prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks
on the United States. These allegations will no doubt play
themselves out over the next several weeks. But Clarke has also,
inadvertently, provided an unflattering glimpse behind the scenes
of the Clinton presidency.
In an interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press
Sunday morning, Clarke was asked why Clinton, whom Clarke has
praised for his attentiveness to the threat of terrorism, didn’t
bomb al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan after the October 2000 attack on
the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors — despite
Clarke’s recommendation that he do so.
Defending Clinton, Clarke replied (emphasis added): “The FBI and
the CIA refused to say who did it in October of 2000. The president
was therefore faced with the problem: ‘Can I go ahead and bomb
somebody in retaliation for the attack on the Cole when my
CIA director and my FBI director won’t say who did it?’ Now this is
the same president who, when he [previously] bombed … al
Qaeda camps, because George Tenet and I and Sandy Berger
recommended he do it, in order to get bin Laden and the leadership
team, where we thought they were going to be meeting, the reaction
he faced to that was the so-called wag-the-dog phenomenon.…
[The media and Congress] said ‘This is all about Monica Lewinsky.
This is all about your political problems.’ So now the same
president, who had that experience the last time he fired cruise
missiles at bin Laden, wants to fire cruise missiles at bin
Laden, but now he’s got a CIA director and an FBI director who
won’t say bin Laden did it. I would still have done it. I
recommended doing it. Do I think it was a mistake that we didn’t do
it? Yes. But let’s understand the context.”
The key line is italicized. Clarke asserts that President
Clinton wanted to fire cruise missiles into Afghanistan to
kill bin Laden, on Clarke’s own recommendation, but finally decided
against it because of wag-the-dog accusations he had encountered
during the Lewinsky scandal.
That’s worth bearing in mind the next time Clinton defenders
argue that his personal indiscretions were his own business. If the
fallout over the Lewinsky scandal in any way colored his decision
not to go after bin Laden in 2000 — as Clarke alleges — then
history will judge Clinton’s inability to keep his pants zipped in
a far different light.
