RICHARD CLARKE SAYS IRAQ WAS SUGGESTED THE FIRST WEEK

Richard Clarke apparently charges that the idea of putting Iraq in the bombing que was brought up immediately after September 11th. Here is my response to this shocking charge: WELL DUH!

Listen, I get that this man has a book to sell and CBS has a show to plug, but is this the best they could do?

Come on, people!

This man was inside White House counterterrorism as al Queda grew. You don't think that he'd be worth listening to, or his book worth buying without peddling old information as if it was shocking new revelation? (Hell, I already pre-ordered my copy.) But the fact that Iraq was put on the table at the Camp David meeting of the Cabinet and inner group of National Security experts has been known since Bob Woodward and Dan Balz published, "Ten Days in September," the Washington Post series that grew into the book, Bush at War.

The press does this all the time: some old info is published as a shocking new tidbid. Are they too lazy to check? Or do they know they're being used to sell something with a tidbit the publisher knows sounds shocking and figure, why not, I don't mind being used, I don't think people will remember either, and I don't care if it sells books for them as long as it sells ratings for me?

(But I do wonder if he's so very down on this President's record fighting terrorism: will she ask him how he feels about how the previous administration did?)

Update: Or perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps there are other reasons why this is the one tidbit that gets pulled out of the book. There has been plenty of reporting since Clarke has left government that he was never happy with the way the US responded to al Queda. Do you think he liked the way the Clinton people were dealing with the growing threat? Do you think that his entire book has nothing in it but complaints about the Bushie's eight months, and their response to September 11th? Don't count on it. But I just watched both NBC and ABC and they both set up the release of the book and Clarke's testimony this week before the 9/11 Commission as a major political threat to this President.

Well if that's all that these networks can pull out of that book, what was said about Iraq after 9/11, then either this is the thinnest book in the world, and Clarke has forgotten an awful lot of his professional life, or those reporters sure were cherry picking.

Take what Clarke is already on the record as saying about the Clinton people's refusal to respond to the Cole. I don't think there is anything close to reliable evidence for the rumour (and it is just a rumour) that Clinton could have taken bin Laden from the Sudenese, but everything else on this list of misses and failures seems legitimate to me. You think Clarke has no opinion on those?

Well, maybe, maybe not. Here's an excellent little piece indicting the famous Time article pronouncing that the Clinton people had presented the Bushies with an off-the-shelf plan for fighting al Queda, and while I had remembered that article as talking at length about Sandy Berger's role, this piece reminds that Clarke is heavily mentioned as well.

Which takes me back to my first point: apparently I was wrong at first: there's more to the apparent excitment over a single argument in a book, even though that argument isn't new (come to think of it, wasn't that the argument made in the book about Paul O'Neill as well?) then met the eye at first.

Comments

[Ron Hardin]

It's plainly not supposed to shock. It's rather supposed to hook into the existing soap opera with characters madman Rumsfield and his dupe Bush. The market is for that drama, not for the shock. It's an anti-shock actually, just a replay.

> The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq....We all said, 'but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan," recounts Clarke, "and Rumsfeld said, 'There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.' I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the September 11 attacks].'"

You could say it's aimed at the media using that drama (the irresponsible man drama, call it : the signs were there all along!), like the NYT might pick it up for them. And CBS uses that drama already, and it has an audience already.

Far from shocking, it's boring and tedious, if you're the sort that has already tuned them out.

Buckley almost instantly after 9/11 had the whole plan in an essay http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley091401.shtm

Talk about shock!

[Pat]

I gather this is still news, not simply because Clarke's publisher and a susceptible media want it to be, but because the focus on Iraq immediately after 9-11 still makes no sense. Who in the intel community had been sounding the alarm bells on Iraq? Who in the intel commmunity was pointing furiously at Iraq as a meaningful contributor to the aims and operational capabilities of al Qaeda? Baghdad was so far down the list of concerns among the people who, you know, make a living out of identifying and quantifying the worrisome, that the administration's Iraq precoccupation appeared, in the context of 9-11 and prior attacks, wholly misguided, if not downright arbitrary. Iraq may have been, from the White House's point of view, a desirable target of regime change for reasons other than hampering al Qaeda's ability to operate or sacking a regime that posed a different but nonetheless direct and potent danger to the US, but that's not the story they tell.

Yes, it was known to the public early on that Rumsfeld wanted to strike Baghdad. That doesn't mean that what Rumsfeld or anyone else of like mind wanted makes any more sense now than it did then.

As Bill Buckley writes: "The United States suffers from the immaterialization of an objectifiable enemy: there is no Berlin, no Tokyo, no enemy fleet." Ah, but there is now a new Mecca and a new rallying cry for aspiring jihadis and sundry resisters against American military projection. Just ask the Iraqis.

[Ron Hardin]

My link to Buckley dropped a character at the end
http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley091401.shtml

The idea was not to punish the Iraqis but to set up something in the area that doesn't support terrorism. Bush's contribution was persisting in saying that Islam is a religion of peace, ie. this is the direction you should go, and producing every incentive to go that way. This is what is being undermined in the politics of proving Bush wrong; and it looks like gaining the Presidency is more important than solving the problem. Which is why politics once stopped at the water's edge, as the saying once went.

There isn't enough drama in that for some people. It has to be a soap opera instead.

[Pat]

"Bush's contribution was persisting in saying that Islam is a religion of peace..."

Islam may very well be a religion of peace, but I do not think this should be confused with a religion or culture amenable to Western subjection.

"...politics once stopped at the water's edge..."

When, exactly, was this Golden Age of foreign and defense policies without public and political controversy?

[Ron Hardin]

It's not subjugation that's in mind. It's reformation.

[Ron Hardin]

I would say Vietnam was the end of the water's edge idea. The idea of unpatriotism in criticism that undermines the policy comes from its undermining the policy, not from disagreeing with it. Why give up if another administration may be along to give you a better deal? So it was sort of agreed that administration races wouldn't politicize things that way. They'd politicize something else and run on that instead. At the moment the critics don't exactly want to undermine the chances of success so much as be sure that Bush is wrong in everything. It fits the story that way.

You can't have the evil guy in the soap opera doing good deeds now and then.

[Pat]

"It's not subjugation that's in mind. It's reformation."

How kindly would you take, Ron, to reformation by force of arms?

[Ron Hardin]

Christians had one. Jews had one. (A reforamation.) It means the church doesn't do politics. Bush's idea is to make it attractive; it's easier with the help of the other side. The arms use is precise and limited, did you notice?