Clarke, Clarke, Clarke...

It sets one's head a-spinning. The attacks on Richard Clarke have been nonstop and nonsensical. Joshua Marshall provides a must-read analysis, as always. I must reiterate and expand upon one of his key points. He quotes NSC spokesman Jim Wilkinson on Clarke:

"This is a president who had Condoleezza Rice and others ask for a strategy. Dick Clarke, when he first came and briefed, presented several ideas, all of which frankly were overseas... I want to make a very point here, that all of his ideas he presented were not a strategy. This is a president who wanted a comprehensive strategy to go after al Qaeda where it lives, where it hides, where it plots, where it raises money. All the ideas that -- except for one -- that Dick Clarke submitted, this administration did."

Clarke did, in fact, outline a strategy to hit al Qaeda where it lived -- literally -- years before Bush took office. His big idea was to drop bombs on Afghanistan and kill Osama Bin Laden. The AP story cited in a previous post makes the point clearly.

If the Bushanistas had attacked Osama as viciously as they are now attacking Clarke, the World Trade Center towers might still be standing. Administration hagiographers don't much care if their arguments against Clarke make sense, or if they contradict each other. Some administration apologists (Cheney, for example) tells us Clarke was out of the loop, a low-level guy. Others (Wilkinson, for example) berate Clarke because "he was in charge of counterterrorism" when 911 happened -- as though the disaster was all his fault, when in fact he was the one guy in the administration who wanted to chuck bombs at Osama Bin Laden.

C'mon, guys, get your stories straight. He was either small potatoes or the chief spud. You can't have it both ways.

(That phrase "not in the loop" -- it seems so familiar. Wasn't that something Bush the elder said, vis-a-vis the Irangate arms-for-hostages deal? And didn't he later admit, in an interview on October 13, 1992, that he was lying, that he knew all along that arms were traded for hostages?)

Cheney's argument hinges on his assertion that Clarke moved from counterterrorism to cybersecurity before 911. Actually, Clarke did not make the switch until later. At the time of the attacks, he was in the White House situation room, more or less running the show as Condaleezza Rice told him: "Okay, Dick, you're the crisis manager; what do you recommend?"

The Bushites are still trying to damn Clarke by his association with Rand Beers, the counter-intelligence specialist whose story parallels Clarke's: Beers quit the administration because he felt the president mishandled the war on terrorism, then went on to become an advisor to John Kerry, at a time when Kerry was still floundering. I don't see how one can damn Beers for ambition when he quit a position of power to join a campaign that then had (and probably still has) little hope of attaining power. Neither does it redound to Bush's credit that his former terrorism specialist has accused him of "underestimating the enemy" and ignoring many pressing domestic security concerns.

Ryan Lizza makes this superb point: "How can you defend yourself from charges that you didn't take terrorism seriously before 9/11 while simultaneously attacking the credibility of the person you put in charge of terrorism before 9/11?"

Answer: You write Clarke out of the history, much as Stalin's literary goons wrote Trotsky out of the Russian Revolution. So Clarke was unimportant. Except for 911. 911 was all his fault.

And we've always been at war with Eastasia. We have never been at war with Westasia.