The high price of hindsight
National security has been the core of President Bush's appeal to the public since 9/11. So it's no wonder that the attack on the Bush record by Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism adviser to four administrations, has inspired such a furious response. But the issue is too grave to be met by assaults on Clarke's integrity or by his attacks on Bush. It's the evidence that counts.
Clarke has two substantive criticisms. First, the new administration was slow to come up with a plan for dealing with the terrorist threat before 9/11. Second, the decision to go to war against Iraq has undermined the war on terrorism.
Let's take the first charge. The Bush foreign policy team came into office focusing on those powers capable of disruption on a grand scale, hence its concern with missile defense--still a relevant issue. China was a long-term strategic challenge that was highlighted by the collision of a Chinese fighter plane with an American spy plane just months into the new administration.
"Principals." Planning to counter threats from nonstate actors was not at the top of the agenda. But, as Condoleezza Rice testified, there was nothing unusual about that. Every new administration needs time to organize its conduct of policy. Adapting bumper-sticker nostrums to the complex realities of the world simply cannot be accomplished overnight. The Bush team had to develop its own antiterrorism policy, since none was transferred from the Clinton administration. Bush's key advisers, "the principals," signed off on the new policy on Sept. 4, 2001. In fact, as Clarke has acknowledged, the Bush administration had developed a broader strategy that, among other things, called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda rather than its slower erosion. The president, in fact, had already authorized a fivefold increase in CIA funding to pursue al Qaeda.
It is also true that the American people had little awareness of the threat of stateless terrorist networks fired by religious fanaticism. It was almost inconceivable that such groups could coordinate the suicide of 19 young zealots and murder nearly 3,000 innocents when we had not been attacked on our homeland since Pearl Harbor. Nor did the American media, by and large, evince much interest in terrorism. After President Clinton fired cruise missiles at al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan, bombed a factory in Sudan, and bombed Iraq again, many Republicans and much of the press dismissed these as an attempt to "wag the dog" and distract the public from the Monica Lewinsky affair. To his credit, Clinton continued speaking out about terrorism and the need to reorganize the government to counter it, underscoring the terrorists' "increasing access to . . . chemical and biological weapons." His words, sadly, had little effect. Even serious warnings that Americans in large numbers could die on American soil, such as that issued by the Hart-Rudman Commission, were ignored by most of the leading newspapers and magazines.
Success, it has been said, has many fathers. But so does failure, and that is certainly the case here. No leader in either the Clinton or the Bush administration could have credibly supported Clarke's urgings to hunt down terrorists in Afghanistan and destroy their training camps prior to the 9/11 attacks. Now, he laments, we have to hunt them down "country by country." True, but this applies to the Clinton presidency, too, when Clarke was the top counterterrorism official but was unable to persuade the administration to take more vigorous action against al Qaeda. Clarke suggests the Clinton administration was more in earnest but was distracted by crises like the one in the Middle East. The same distraction defense can be made by Bush.
advertisement
