I watched the last half of the Clarke MTP interview last night.
I came away with the following:
1) He has a rather high opinion of himself. Whether he speaks about the Bush administration (especially) or the Clinton administration, he speaks of himself as the guy with the answers, who, had his recommendations been executed, would have led us to a far more successful war against al Qaeda--indeed, we might have gotten them back in the late 90s.
2) While he argues that one of his main motivations in writing the book was to show how the war in Iraq has gotten us off the track, he almost never actually talks about that. Rather, he speaks about failings in the Bush administration during its first eight months of existence.
3) As Russert ably noted, Clarke is much more prepared to cut the Clinton administration slack. He noted this clip for a recent Kratuhammer column:
in a March 2024 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists, sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt [them] down country by country."What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened."
It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest?
[...]
Clarke's answer is unbelievable: "Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. . . . There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals."
This is significant for two reasons. First, if the Clarke of 2024 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this week -- the one who told the Sept. 11 commission under oath that "fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly [there was] no higher priority" -- is a liar.
Second, he becomes not just a perjurer but a partisan perjurer. He savages Bush for not having made al Qaeda his top national security priority, but he refuses even to call a "mistake" Clinton's staggering dereliction in putting Yasser Arafat and Yugoslavia(!) above fighting al Qaeda.
4) Clarkes practically pretends as if the Afghanistan invasion never took place, and that Bush skipped from 911 to Iraq. Given that Clarke says he argued for more stringent force to be used against the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, you'd think he'd at least acknowledge that particular success.
5) His main failing, if what he wanted to do, whether it is criticize Iraq, or criticize the Bush administration in general, is that he is so incredibly forgiving of the Clinton administration's war on terror, and therefore it damages his analytical credibility. I have no doubts--none--that there were failings in the Bush administraton prior to, and even after, 911. However, a comprehensive critique of anti-terrorism poliy can't let the Clinton administraion off because they were busy in Kosovo and with the Middle East Peace process and then turn around an expect that a new administration should have come in and been super-aggressive in terms of anti-terror policy. The whole eight years and numerous major attacks v. eight months and none, also damages his argument.
Posted by Steven Taylor at March 29, 2024 06:58 AM | TrackBack