OVER THIS last week, former White House counter-terrorism aide Richard Clarke has led a sort of all-out media blitz, going on "60 Minutes" to promote his new book, "Against All Enemies" (which, coincidentally, was published by a subsidiary of Viacom, which owns CBS), testifying before the 9-11 Commission and talking tough on Sunday morning political talk shows.
This is a great strategy to sell lots of books and reward one's self for years of public service, but very poor for prompting an honest, impartial look into how the Clinton and Bush administrations have dealt with terrorism. In the final assessment, Clarke isn't just a publicity hound out to make a dollar. He's also wrong in the criticisms he makes of the Bush counterterrorism policy and about an Iraq-bin Laden link.
There is certainly nothing wrong with questioning how this and previous administrations have handled the perilous problem terrorism poses to world security. It is an issue more vital than any other; without security, civil society cannot function. But it is quite another thing when the person making those criticisms has to change his views and write a book full of questionable representations of the administration to do so. As David Brooks said in The New York Times on Saturday, "Clarke turns himself into an anti-Bush attack machine, and we get a case study of how serious bipartisan concern gets turned into a week of civil war."
Clarke is the classic disgruntled former employee. Passed over for a promotion, he resigned from his post in January 2003. According to his interview with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," he felt that he was not being listened to enough by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. What sounds like a splash of egotism to the impartial observer is interpreted as administrative failure by Clarke.
Having felt sufficiently snubbed, Clarke has pulled a Paul O'Neill and tries to take his former boss to task in his book. To sum up the book in a few phrases: The Clinton policy towards terrorism was right, the Bush policy is terribly flawed and Clarke was a policy visionary who was too often neglected in his capacities.
Never mind the soft treatment that Clarke gives Clinton with regard to his errors, such as not bombing al Qaeda targets and failing to push the CIA hard enough to capture Osama bin Laden even as he gave them unprecedented allowances to do so. Clarke terribly distorts the Bush administration's policy by making it seem that they didn't care as much about terrorist threats, perhaps because they didn't grant him as much face time with the president (in reading this book, one gets the sense that Clarke's mantra could be, "Give me a meeting, and I shall move the Earth," to paraphrase Archimedes).
This comes as quite a surprise considering Clarke's previous statements. Speaking to Fox News' Jim Angle in August 2002, Clarke affirmed that the Bush administration stopped none of the counterterrorism programs that the Clinton administration had set forth (of which he speaks glowingly of in his book), and actually stepped up funding for covert activities many times over. So if the Bush policy is like the Clinton policy, only more so, how could it be so flawed?
Nevertheless, Clarke continues in his litany of wrongheaded statements like the one he made on "60 Minutes" that "there is absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda ever." As Deroy Murdock points out for the National Review on March 26, Clarke has either testified about or should be aware of links between Iraq and al Qaeda around the globe from Baghdad to the Philippines, ranging from giving sanctuary to al Qaeda member Abdul Rahman Yasin, who helped orchestrate the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, to a document from the Iraqi Intelligence Service listing bin Laden as an IIS "collaborator."
Granted, it's not a picture of Saddam Hussein and bin Laden making WMDs together, but they are concrete links.
But perhaps we should look at Clarke's successes. He's successfully become a willing conduit for irrational Bush-haters and has made himself a pretty penny, maybe even secured some sort of future within a Kerry administration should that come upon us, although for now he denied this on "Meet the Press." But an accurate presenter of the facts he is not.
Jim Prosser's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at jprosser@cavalierdaily.com.
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