If nothing else, Bill Clinton definitely put the
right man in charge of fighting al-Qa’ida.
Evidently, the Bush administration once thought
so, too. On the morning of 9/11, it was
Richard Clarke who ran the White House Situation
Room while almost everybody else
ran for bomb shelters, and Air Force One flew
hither and yon until conditions were safe
enough for the president to return to Washington.
During the most perilous day in recent
American history, Clarke and several colleagues—who’d
been war-gaming terrorist
scenarios, drawing up disaster response protocols
and warning a complacent White House
that something terrible was about to happen—essentially
became the U.S. government.
They handled all communications, grounded civilian
aircraft, closed the nation’s borders,
shut down its ports and notified the nervous
Russians that putting the U. S military on its
highest state of alert in 30 years didn’t portend
a nuclear attack. This is the guy Dick
Cheney says was "out of the loop." He ought to
know better than to trifle with Clarke.
Intense and abrasive, he’s served four presidents,
starting with Ronald Reagan, and
has a reputation as a fierce bureaucratic infighter.
After resigning in frustration, Clarke clearly
went to school on the Bush team, somewhat
as he once studied Osama bin Laden. Understanding
that George W. Bush’s main political
asset was his carefully crafted image as a decisive
leader in the "war on terror," Clarke
watched the administration vilify one critic
after another.
Everybody who questioned invading Iraq, a secular,
oil-rich Arab police state, instead of
fighting al-Qa’ida, a stateless band of religious
fanatics, got it in the back: former Army
Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, Marine Gen. Anthony
Zinni, Ambassador Joe Wilson and his
wife Valerie Plame, former Treasury Secretary
Paul O’Neill. All had their reputations
tarnished, their honesty assailed, even their
patriotism questioned. There are no facts
in Bush World, only motives.
Knowing that his book, "Against All Enemies,"
would depict a White House that dismissed
terrorism as a Clinton era obsession, reacted
passively to warnings of an impending al-Qa’ida
strike during the summer of 2001, then did precisely
as bin Laden wished by attacking Iraq
without finishing the job in Afghanistan, Clarke
clearly anticipated the administration’s counterattack.
Over the past two weeks, he’s singlehandedly made
the Bush White House look like chumps,
anticipating their every move and outmaneuvering
the GOP smear machine. Accustomed to
bullying adversaries into silence, the White
House has made one tactical blunder after another.
The result has been a political disaster.
After Clarke’s book depicted Bush on Sept. 12,
2001, urging him to pin 9/11 on Saddam
Hussein (the FBI and CIA fingered the hijackers
as al-Qa’ida operatives almost immediately),
an aide to Condi Rice told "60 Minutes" it never
happened. Problem was, Clarke had witnesses.
Evidently, the only party to the conversation
who’d forgotten it was the president himself.
The White House changed its story. Rice now alibis
that Bush’s suspicions were justified.
Next, Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn, all but charged
Clarke with perjury on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Frist asserted that earlier testimony he subsequently
admitted not reading differed from what
Clarke told the 9/11 Commission last week. Fine,
Clarke responded on "Meet the Press."
"I would welcome it being declassified," he said,
"but not just a little line here or there.
Let’s declassify all six hours of my testimony."
He challenged Rice to let her testimony before
the 9/11 Commission be made public, too.
Also his e-mails and memos to and from her office.
Those would have the embarrassing effect
of proving that the counter-terrorist policies
the Bush White House adopted in September
2001 were virtually identical to strategies he’d
developed at then-President Clinton’s urging.
Pressed by Tim Russert to justify portraying Clinton
as far more responsive to the terrorist
threat than Bush in his book, Clarke was characteristically
blunt: "Well, he did something,
and President Bush did nothing prior to Sept.
11." "Against All Enemies" pulls no punches.
Clark candidly assesses the Monica Lewinsky scandal’s
debilitating impact upon Clinton’s
ability to fight al-Qa’ida. "Like most of his
advisors," he writes, "I was beyond mad that the
President had not shown enough discretion or
self control, although... I was angrier, almost
incredulous, that the bitterness of Clinton’s
enemies knew no bounds, that they intended to
hurt not just Clinton but the country by turning
the President’s personal problem into a global,
public circus for their own political ends."
Each time Clinton struck al-Qa’idaor warned
against terrorism, Republicans accused him of
trying to divert attention from his sexual sins.
So, yeah, Clarke has an ax to grind. He clearly
believes Republicans put party over country
during the Clinton years, and that the Bush White
House is doing it again. And so far, he’s
getting the best of the argument.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.