The high price of hindsight
Clarke's complaint about the lack of urgency in the first eight months of the Bush administration is undermined by the fact that the government did go to heightened alert levels in July and August 2001 and by the fact that he refused to attend the National Security Council staff meetings chaired by Rice, where he could have conveyed his concerns. But Clarke's most revealing testimony may have come in response to former Sen. Slade Gorton's question: "Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25, 2001 . . . had all been adopted say, on January 26, 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?" Clarke replied grimly: "No." That simple utterance speaks volumes about the import of Clarke's allegations. Clarke's answer is consistent with the common-sense verdict of the American people about why 9/11 occurred and explains why opinion polls have not shifted, despite the exploitation of Clarke's testimony by the Democrats. The 9/11 terrorists were already in America. The FBI seemed unable to detect the plot and structurally unable to pass along whatever it did know, either to its leaders or to other agencies of the government.
The issue is not who knew about the intentions of radical Islamic terrorists to kill innocent civilians but how much could have been done about it before the public mood changed on 9/11. Until then, we buried our heads in the sand. That's the genesis of the phrase "September 11 changed everything." It transformed America's willingness to respond to threats against it. As Clarke himself pointed out, "This country . . . requires body bags to make really tough decisions." After 9/11, Bush declared war on terrorism and terrorists, and we began to wage a covert war against al Qaeda and an overt war against the Taliban and Iraq.
Clarke's second contention is that the war on Iraq undermined the war on terrorism, producing more jihadists and giving them more targets closer to home. But how prudent would it have been to leave Iraq to simmer? The presumption in Clarke's charge is that terrorists, in pursuit of their program of mass murder, would refrain from conspiring with enemies who could have given them access to weapons of mass destruction.
Rogues. The crucial Bush decision was not to wait to find out. This decision was based, correctly, on the recognition that we are now facing a group of religious terrorists consumed by a culture of death, mostly from the Arab world, in a world without clear battle lines. Tragically, we must now assume that there could, one day, be a catastrophic attack if terrorists get access to weapons of mass death. We must also assume that the most likely suppliers of such weapons would be the rogue states that the Bush administration has targeted.
Going into Iraq was a key step in the fight against Arab radicalism because Iraq was at the core of Arab rejectionism of, and hostility to, the West. Saddam Hussein represented a threat that was not based exclusively on his presumed possession of banned weapons but on his outsized ambitions, his unrestrained tyranny, his radicalism, and his hatred of the West. CIA Director George Tenet wrote to the Senate on Oct. 7, 2002, of "senior-level contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda going back a decade" and of "credible reporting" revealing that "Iraq had provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs"--a capability that Iraq retained until Saddam's overthrow.
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