MAR. 24, 2004: DICK CLARKE'S AMERICAN GRANDSTAND
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Finished his book late last night – and have to say that while I began reading it with disapproval, I ended with dismay.
Here is a once great public servant engaging in the shabbiest kind of name-calling and George Soros-style paranoia. (The “Enemies” of the Constitution in the “Against All Enemies” title refers pretty clearly to George Bush and the Bush administration. Clarke goes on to tut-tut over how the Patriot Act has been interpreted as a fascist piece of legislation – without pausing to point out how crazy that interpretation that is or how essential the Patriot Act has been to just the kind of counter-terrorism work that he favors.)
Still, there are things that can be learned from the book.
One is that for all the praise that Clarke pours on Bill
Clinton personally, he presents an absolutely damning
account of the terrorism record of the Clinton
administration. Time and time again, he and his team agree
that a course of action is vital – up to and including air
raids against the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan
(air raids not cruise missile raids – cruise missiles are
slow and gave the Pakistanis time to tip off al Qaeda that
the bombs were coming). And nothing happens. Either the
bureaucracy refuses to carry out the order or the military
drags its feet or (most typically) President Clinton rules
out courses of action that carry any risk at all.
Just as Bob Bartley and Barbara Olson predicted at the very onset of the Clinton presidency, so Clarke agrees that Clinton’s ability to defend the country was paralyzed by his personal failings. (Although Clarke shares that strange Clintonian self-pity which adjudged the president’s inaction always to be somebody else’s fault.)
“Because of the intensity of the political opposition that Clinton engendered, he had been heavily criticized for bombing al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, for engaging in ‘Wag the Dog’ tactics to divert attention from a scandal about his personal life. For similar reasons, he could not fire the recalcitrant FBI Director who had failed to fix the Bureau or to uncover terrorists in the United States. He had given the CIA unprecedented authority to go after bin Laden personally and al Qaeda, but had not taken steps when they did little or nothing. Because Clinton was criticized as a Vietnam War opponent without a military record, he was limited in his ability to direct the military to engage in anti-terrorist commando operations they did not want to conduct. He had tried that in Somalia, and the military had made mistakes and lamed him. In the absence of a bigger provocation from al Qaeda to silence his critics, Clinton thought he could do no more.” (p. 225.)
Sometimes reading Clarke’s book makes you wonder whether
the United States had a president at all between 1993 and
2001. Please excuse the blue language in the following
passage.
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“On a brisk October day in 2000, [Army Special Forces
colonel Mike] Sheehan stood with me on West Executive
Avenue and watch[ed] as the limousines left the White
House meeting on the Cole attack to go back to the
Pentagon. ‘What’s it gonna take, Dick?’ Sheehan
demanded. ‘Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole,
fuckin’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go
get bin Laden. Hell, they won’t even let the Air Force
bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon
to get their attention.”
That same Constitution that Clarke accuses George Bush of
violating also appoints the president commander-in-chief
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**
On to the Bush material.
Early on, the Bush team made a fateful decision about
Clarke. They asked him to stay on at the National Security
Council – but demoted him from the high position he had
held under Bill Clinton. Clarke had for eight years
enjoyed more access to the president than the head of the
CIA or FBI. Suddenly he found himself just another NSC
senior director.
It’s a general rule of management that you never demote anybody important: You fire them, and fast, or else they will sabotage your organization. If Bush wanted to retain Clarke’s services, he should have kept him in his old job. Failing that, he should have pushed him out the door on the Monday after Inauguration day.
That didn’t happen, for pardonable reasons and not so pardonable. The pardonable reason was the shortness of time: Bush had less than six weeks to complete his transition – the recount plus the ever-increasing sclerosis of the clearing and confirmation process meant that he did not have his own people up and ready to go until the second half of 2001. The not so pardonable reason was a phenomenon I noted in The Right Man: a reluctance to use the hiring and firing power to shape the NSC in favor of the president’s policies. For almost a year, Bush and Condoleezza Rice tried to use Clinton holdovers to carry out Bush’s policies. Unsurprisingly, the experiment has not been a happy one.
**
More important though is that Clarke confirms something else I saw – and that something is the essence of the case for George Bush’s leadership. The core of Clarke’s unhappiness with George Bush is that Bush disregarded the “expert” advice of government professionals after 9/11. Clarke saw 9/11 as a reason to continue and expand the policies of the Clinton years: to hunt down individual terrorists while taking one more whirligig ride on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, so-called, Bush’s breakthrough after 9/11 was his willingness to rethink old assumptions and to consider new and seemingly radical ideas – because only such ideas were equal to the newness and radicalism of the situation.
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When a set of ideas are tried over eight years – and
result in one of the greatest disasters in American
history – you’d think that might tend to discredit those
ideas. You’d think so – but as we’re discovering in this
campaign season, you’d be wrong.
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