Condi Rice is responding to Dick Clarke's charges, and she ain't happy. Would you be? Nonetheless, she has some good points. Afterall, you might argue that bureaucratic infighting kept the armed Predator from flying for too long, but when the time came, they had an armed Predator ready to go -- and she's right, by the time the Bushies took office, having an armed Predator over Afghanistan wasn't going to help. The hijackers were already in Florida. And there was a plan going through to increase funding for the Northern Alliance (I'm rereading Bush at War, Woodward's book, right now, just by coincidence, since we're up to that point in my class on the Political Rhetoric of September 11th.
The truth of the matter is that, first, it isn't clear that there was any way the plot would have been uncovered once it had unspooled to that point, given the level of security and compartmentalization the terrorists practised, but frankly, I doubt there was any chance to crack it with the Patriot Act not being in existance at the time. More to the point is this: Clarke doesn't really charge that before September 11th the Bushies were doing the wrong things as much as they weren't really doing anything at all, it isn't until Iraq that he starts complaining about the specific policy choices they make.
Well that's a much easier charge to answer. All they have to do is say, look, we may have been asking alot of questions about Iraq, but, really, as far as nation states went Saddam was job one: why is that unreasonable? You can't hang us for asking questions. The issue is what actions we took. Well, look, pal, here's a list. Because clearly they were taking actions before September 11th. They just weren't consulting with him all that much.
So you have to wonder. Is his beef that they weren't doing enough? or that they weren't doing enough with him?
Clarke's interview on 60 minutes simply added to the overall picture of an administration unaccountably preoccupied with a regime that posed no credible threat to the United States. That preoccupation would lead to a war unrelated to the national defense - a war costing (so far) hundreds of American lives, thousands of American casualties, and hundreds of billions of dollars, while at the same time enlarging the arena of Islamic terror and providing a recruiting and propaganda windfall for the organizers of that terror.
That's the unfolding tragedy of grave errors that just won't go away, Clarke or no Clarke.
Posted by: Pat | March 22, 2004 at 07:48 AM