Richard Clarke is still making waves

We haven’t been hearing too much lately about Richard Clarke, Bush’s former counterterrorism czar who threw Washington into turmoil a few months ago by explaining that the White House was asleep at the wheel before 9/11, ignoring imminent threats and downplaying the significance of terrorism in general.

Clarke’s name may have disappeared from the front pages, but he’s still out there sticking it to the Bush administration. Good for him.

For example, over the weekend, Clarke came to the same conclusion most of us did about the Bush administration and the terror threats: they’re trying to scare us into voting for them.

Former White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke on Sunday accused members of the US administration of using terror warnings to manipulate voters ahead of the presidential election in November.

Clarke, who resigned last year, said the conflicting assessments of the risk of terror attacks presented by US Homeland Security Department Secretary Tom Ridge and US Attorney General John Ashcroft last week showed how some officials sought to inflate the threat for political gain.

“That was ass-covering, or perhaps, dare I say it, politics in an election year,” said Clarke, who was in Berlin on a book tour to promote his unflattering account of US President George W Bush’s anti-terrorism policies, entitled The Price of Loyalty.

A few days later, Clarke, who’s already expressed strong disapproval of the war in Iraq, said Bush picked the wrong Middle East target to invade.

It would have made more sense to invade Iran than Iraq, says a former U.S. counterterrorism adviser who has already accused the Bush administration of being soft on terrorism and wasting resources by attacking Iraq.

Richard Clarke, a former adviser to three U.S. presidents and four administrations, said mere possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) did not justify invading a country. This was the U.S. government’s stated grounds for the Iraq war.

“If you take the case of Iran, its nuclear program is far more advanced than Iraq’s was,” Clarke told the Austrian daily Der Standard in an interview translated into German. “There would have been far more grounds to invade there (Iran).”

I guess Clarke’s been dropped from the Bush Christmas card list.