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Clarke in the Crosshairs
Former Terrorism Czar Attacks White House Handling of the War on Terror
Richard
Clarke, C’72, has emerged from more than 20 years in
Washington’s bureaucratic shadows with a hard-hitting
critique that blames the Bush administration for failing
to understand the threat posed by Al Qaeda while launching
an unnecessary war on Iraq. Clarke, a political science major
who became the nation’s first “counterterrorism
czar” under President Clinton, held the same post in
the current Bush Administration. He resigned last year after
the president and key advisers ignored his warnings.
Clarke’s story appears in a new book, Against
All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.
In the memoir, the author claims that senior advisers declined
his urgent request, some nine months before September 11,
2001, to hold a top-level meeting on the danger posed by
Al Qaeda. Bush insiders assigned a low priority to the
terrorist group, he said, because they were obsessed with
Iraq and determined to make war against it.
Following the strikes against the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, he writes, the president ordered him and his
Counterterrorism Security Group to “[s]ee if Saddam
did this.” Clarke’s repeated assertions, and
reports from the CIA and FBI, that there were no Iraqi links
went unheeded. By September 12, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld was talking about “getting Iraq.”
The Bush Administration has denied that it ignored warnings
about Al Qaeda and contends that Clarke’s allegations
are inconsistent with statements he made during his tenure
as the head of counterterrorism. “This book is 180
degrees from everything else he said, and he just can’t
have it both ways,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice said at a White House press briefing. In a bid to strengthen
the administration’s argument, Rice later agreed, after
resisting intense public pressure, to testify before the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States.
On National Public Radio’s Fresh Air (March
24), Clarke speculated that if the Bush Administration had
given Al Qaeda the scrutiny he and others had called for,
the identities of two 9/11 hijackers would probably not have
remained “buried” in FBI files. With appropriate
publicity, they might have been captured, he said, foiling
the attacks.
Top Bush advisers seemed impervious to “analysis” that
didn’t coincide with their own ideological beliefs,
he told NPR. “The people around the president don’t
show him things that don’t accord with their views
and his views.”
Clarke, a hard-working bureaucrat who reportedly doesn’t
mind offending people when necessary, garnered sympathy during
testimony before the 9/11 Commission by apologizing to victims’ families
for what he said was his own failure and that of the government.
In the NPR interview, Clarke denied that his book—published
just two days before he gave evidence to the commission and
some eight months before the presidential election—is
politically motivated. He said he would decline any job offered
by a future Democratic president. Administration officials
also charged him with seeking publicity for the book.
The war with Iraq has diverted financial and military assets
from conducting a far more important and effective war on
terrorism, particularly in Afghanistan, Clarke argued, and
has inflamed anti-U.S. sentiment throughout the Muslim world. “We
have played right into [terrorists’] hands,” he
said in the radio interview. “We’ve radicalized
a generation of young Muslims, and we’ve given fuel
and ammunition to the terrorist movement.”
“ By invading Iraq,” he told the 9/11 Commission, “the
president of the United States has greatly undermined
the war on terrorism.”
— Jon Hurdle
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