MAR. 29, 2004: TALKING BACK
I do think it was rather petulant of Richard Clarke to complain on “Meet the Press” that the administration is out to “destroy” him. Clarke hurls a series of terrible accusations at the administration and its senior staff – and is then outraged when they reply that Clarke is wrong? Or when they point out that what he says today contradicts what he has said in the past? Or that he might possibly have other motives than those he acknowledges? Or when they note that he seems strangely tolerant of far worse mistakes by the previous administration?
Clarke argues that the issue shouldn’t be personalized. At the same time, he himself criticizes his former colleagues in highly personal terms. He complains of being the victim of an “attack machine.” But his own attack has been rolled out with a mechanical precision that should impress BMW.
For all the to-ing and fro-ing about Clarke’s intentions and integrity, however, we’re basically back at the same old argument about who the enemy is. The Clintonite view – classically expressed by Clinton NSC staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in The Age of Sacred Terror is that we are up against a purely stateless terror network. Al Qaeda is its own independent thing, disconnected from Arab governments. In the current Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria takes the argument one step further, arguing that al Qaeda does not need states at all.
This way of looking at things has its advantages – principally that it spares the United States the unwelcome task of re-examining its relationships with its traditional allies in the Middle East, and especially with Saudi Arabia.
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But this way of looking at things also has one big disadvantage: It’s not true.
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Without the indulgence and complaisance of governments worldwide, al Qaeda could never have taken form. If the Saudis had cut off the flow of funds to al Qaeda, if Afghanistan had denied al Qaeda its territory, if Pakistan had not formed a tacit alliance with al Qaeda and the Taliban, if radical governments like Arab had not incited anti-American and anti-Western extremism, and if moderate governments like Egypt had not appeased it – minus all these ifs, al Qaeda would never have become the menace it has become.
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President Bush’s achievement in the war on terror is to have seen the problem for what it is, without illusions – and then to have had the courage to act. Richard Clarke’s attempt to present the 1990s as a heroic age of struggle against terrorism is an audacious upending of the facts. The United States was hit and hit and hit again – and never even acknowledged to itself who was hitting it and who was paying for the hits.
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But while President Bush should get full marks for what he has done, the administration has done a worryingly bad job this week of defending its record. Why shouldn’t Condoleezza Rice, for example, testify to the 9/11 commission? The administration’s fears about separation of powers are valid enough – but the commission is not a congressional committee, it’s a blue-ribbon panel of experts from both parties. Why put yourself into a position where you have to explain why it’s OK for Rice to talk to “60 Minutes” but not to the nation’s designated investigators of the worst disaster in its modern history?
In action, the Bush administration is bold. But in communication, it is extraordinarily cautious – more afraid of saying the wrong thing than of omitting to say the right one. Calvin Coolidge said that you never have to apologize for what you don’t say – but that’s not right. The things the administration didn’t say to make its case for Iraq; the things it isn’t saying to explain why it over-ruled Richard Clarke – these omissions have been and are damaging. The more fully the Bush administration lays out its case, the more convincing that case is.
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This administration came into office to discover that al Qaeda had been allowed to grow into a full-blown menace. It lost six precious weeks to the Florida recount – and then weeks after Inauguration Day to the go-slow confirmation procedures of a 50-50 Senate. As late as the summer of 2001, pitifully few of Bush’s own people had taken their jobs at State, Defense, and the NSC. Then it was hit by 9/11. And now, now the same people who allowed al Qaeda to grow up, who delayed the staffing of the administration, who did nothing when it was their turn to act, who said nothing when they could have spoken in advance of the attack – these same people accuse George Bush of doing too little? There’s a long answer to give folks like that – and also a short one. And the short one is: <font size=5>How dare you?
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01:20 PM |
