If you missed Richard Clarke on Meet the Press yesterday, you missed a clinic on how to spurn the GOP smear machine. Here was a credible, experienced public servant offering a point-by-point response to each of the baseless attacks, and just importantly, highlighting the underlying purpose of Bush’s character assassination — distracting attention away from the substance of his charges. He was calm, persuasive, and in complete control.
Clarke’s assessment of the Bush White House’s passive disinterest in the terrorist threat before the attacks of Sept. 11 has been devastating, as has his description of the administration in the immediate aftermath. But there was another area of Clarke’s comments that struck me as equally interesting — gauging the administration’s current efforts in the war on terror.
As the top former counterterrorism official in Bush’s and Clinton’s White House, Clarke’s perspective on the ongoing war on terror is significant, and it seems to me, largely ignored because his take on the pre-9/11 environment is so significant.
But for Republicans who (pathetically) argue that Dems are overemphasizing the past (silly us, we’d like to know what led to the biggest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history), I’d point out that Clarke’s appraisal of the White House’s war on terror hasn’t gotten better; it’s gotten worse.
On Wednesday, for example, Clarke told the 9/11 Commission, “[B]y invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism.”
On Meet the Press, Clarke did an excellent job of explaining why.
Clarke: I think it’s obvious [why the Iraq war has undermined the war on terrorism], but there are three major reasons. Who are we fighting in the war on terrorism? We’re fighting Islamic radicals and they are drawing people from the youth of the Islamic world into hating us. Now, after September 11, people in the Islamic world said, “Wait a minute. Maybe we’ve gone too far here. Maybe this Islamic movement, this radical movement, has to be suppressed,” and we had a moment, we had a window of opportunity, where we could change the ideology in the Islamic world. Instead, we’ve inflamed the ideology. We’ve played right into the hands of al-Qaeda and others. We’ve done what Osama bin Laden said we would do.
Ninety percent of the Islamic people in Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, allied countries to the United States — 90 percent in polls taken last month hate the United States. It’s very hard when that’s the game where 90 percent of the Arab people hate us. It’s very hard for us to win the battle of ideas. We can arrest them. We can kill them. But as Don Rumsfeld said in the memo that leaked from the Pentagon, I’m afraid that they’re generating more ideological radicals against us than we are arresting them and killing them. They’re producing more faster than we are.
The president of Egypt said, “If you invade Iraq, you will create a hundred bin Ladens.” He lives in the Arab world. He knows. It’s turned out to be true. It is now much more difficult for us to win the battle of ideas as well as arresting and killing them, and we’re going to face a second generation of al-Qaeda. We’re going to catch bin Laden. I have no doubt about that. In the next few months, he’ll be found dead or alive. But it’s two years too late because during those two years, al-Qaeda has morphed into a hydra-headed organization, independent cells like the organization that did the attack in Madrid.
And that’s the second reason. The attack in Madrid showed the vulnerabilities of the rails in Spain. We have all sorts of vulnerabilities in our country, chemical plants, railroads. We’ve done a very good job on passenger aircraft now, but there are all these other vulnerabilities that require enormous amount of money to reduce those vulnerabilities, and we’re not doing that.Russert: And three?
Clarke: And three is that we actually diverted military resources and intelligence resources from Afghanistan and from the hunt for bin Laden to the war in Iraq.
And therein lies the point that I hope is driven home throughout the 2004 campaign. Bush started a war on terror and then dropped it to go after Saddam Hussein.
The GOP started running an ad four months ago arguing that Bush has been criticized by the Dems for waging the war on terrorism. As has been pointed out repeatedly, the opposite is true — we’re criticizing him for not fighting the war on terrorism.
When Bush invaded Afghanistan, he had universal support. There weren’t any concerns about fighting a war for oil, or invading under false pretenses. Afghanistan and the Taliban had created a breeding ground for terrorists, they were collectively responsible for 9/11, and the president was fully justified — indeed, he had broad international support — in launching an aggressive military response.
I know I’m stating the obvious here, but there’s just no connection between the “war on terror” and the “war on Iraq.” As Clarke said well, the latter actually hurts the former.
Perhaps Clarke’s charges about the White House in early 2001 are so remarkable, it’s hard to look past them. That’s perfectly understandable. But let’s not forget that Clarke is offering an important assessment of Bush’s ongoing failures as well.