At a certain level, it’s perfectly understandable why the right would detest Larry Johnson, a decorated veteran of the CIA and the former deputy director of U.S. State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism. A life-long Republican, Johnson has recently joined the reality-based community — and the only group of people the right hates more than the left are conservatives who have come to their senses.
When it comes to the Plame scandal, few voices have been as significant as Johnson’s. When GOP talking points were released, filled with errors, Johnson debunked them. When Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) questioned Valerie Plame’s undercover status, Johnson set the record straight. When the Democratic Policy Committee hosted a hearing to examine the national security implications of disclosing the identity of a covert intelligence officer, Johnson was there to deliver devastating testimony. Democrats even had Johnson deliver the party’s weekly radio address, highlighting attention on the Plame controversy and condemning the Bush White House for its conduct.
So, what’s the right to do? What else? It’s time for the right-wing attack machine to get into gear.
Gary Schmitt, executive director of the conservative Project for the New American Century, wrote an article for the conservative Weekly Standard, blasting Johnson for having a “pre-9/11 mindset.”
Well, it’s good to see that the former CIA employee is now worried about the war on terror. But it’s a bit late. On July 10, 2001 — two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — Johnson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times (“The Declining Terrorist Threat”) in which he argued that Americans were “bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism” and, in truth, had “little to fear” from terrorism. And, in turn, he rebuked his former colleagues in the national security bureaucracy for using the “fiction” of the terrorist threat to pump up their budgets.
I can think of at least three reasons why Schmitt’s criticism doesn’t make any sense.
First, Schmitt is accusing Johnson of having a pre-9/11 mindset before 9/11. By definition, didn’t everyone have a pre-9/11 mindset before 9/11?
Second, Schmitt’s disparagement of Johnson is making a connection where none exists. To hear Schmitt tell it, Johnson underestimated the terrorist threat four years ago, which necessarily means we shouldn’t take his concerns about the Plame scandal seriously. Even by Weekly Standard standards, that’s pretty weak.
And third, even if we accept Schmitt’s criticism at face value, and suspend doubt long enough to believe that the argument is persuasive, then Schmitt also lacks credibility because he, too, underestimated the terrorist threat before 9/11. As Atrios noted, in November 2000, Schmitt acknowledged bin Laden’s role in international terrorism, but didn’t believe in going after him. And by Schmitt’s own standards, those who misjudged the threat before 9/11 shouldn’t be taken seriously now.
Ultimately, Schmitt’s harangue is sadly predictable. Time and again, we’ve seen this pattern — take on Bush, prepare to be attacked. It happened with Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, Rand Beers, and Joseph Wilson, among others. As Matthew Yglesias put it, this is supposed to put everyone on notice — “make trouble for the White House and they’ll come gunning for you.”
In this context, Johnson should be thrilled. The right wants to undercut his credibility and tarnish his name, and the best they could come up with is some comments about terrorism from four years ago. They’ll have to do better than this.