This is what I want to see become the major question this election year.
'Why Are Our Children Dying?'
By Colbert I. King
The photo in the March 24 Post of a little girl named Jami-Cierra McRae weeping on the flag-draped coffin of her uncle, Army Spec. Jason Ford, is a face of the Iraq war that the rest of the country seldom sees. Her anguish said it all. Ford, a 21-year-old Washington area resident, was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. He didn't make it past his first week in Iraq.
Ford's heartbreaking funeral service has been replicated more than 560 times across the country since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a year ago. There are thousands more members of the U.S. armed forces who must now live out their years with broken bodies. And America, because of Iraq, will soon be $100 billion poorer. Irene Ford, Jason's stepmother, angrily asked the other day: "Why are our children dying? What is the reason for this young boy to lose his life?"
That critical question took a back seat to another drama in Washington this week.
The headlines told it all. They concerned White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke's charges that the Bush administration had failed to treat the al Qaeda threat as a priority before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Bush people angrily denied the accusations and set out to cut Clarke to shreds. Democrats, on the other hand, loved what Clarke had to say and couldn't get enough. And there you have it: Washington at its worst and best -- serving up the kind of political stuff that we in the press can feed off for days.
In truth, the complete story about the state of America's pre-9/11 terrorism preparedness wasn't told this week. That should come in a yet-to-be-published report by the commission investigating the attacks -- if the panel isn't consumed by partisanship. The 10-member group, dubbed the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is expected to provide its final report this summer. That document should tell us what happened -- or failed to happen -- before Sept. 11 and why. I prefer to wait for the complete and unabridged version. The Clarke-White House dispute, though serious by itself and great political theater to boot, is a sideshow to the main event: finding out how the security of the United States was so tragically compromised, and then fixing it.
Irene Ford's haunting question, "What is the reason for this young boy to lose his life?" is an equally urgent matter. And this is where Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies," which went on sale this week, takes on some importance.
Warning: You cannot read it without coming away thinking of Clarke as a self-promoter. Or thinking that the downgrading of his White House office by incoming national security adviser Condoleezza Rice may have bruised a massive yet tender ego. But Clarke was in fact a top national security bureaucrat who worked continuously for the last three presidents. He is not without some standing to talk about these things. And on the subject of the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq, Clarke indeed has something to say.
Clarke was no softie on Iraq. He supported the first Gulf War, backed the Clinton administration's 1993 bombing campaign in Iraq and agrees that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. But he charges that the fight against terrorism suffered badly because Bush advisers, principally Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, entered office in 2001 with Iraq as the No. 1 national security issue. And, Clarke suggests, the focus on unseating Hussein was driven by the desire to settle unfinished Gulf War business, shore up Western access to Middle East oil, make it easier to withdraw U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia, promote democracy in Arab states and improve "Israel's strategic position" in the region.
As a consequence, Clarke says, the Bush administration didn't invest heavily enough in homeland security, in the effort to stabilize a post-Taliban Afghanistan or in helping other governments deal with fundamentalist Islamic terror. It is no small matter that Clarke, the nation's counterterrorism chief, declares that Saddam Hussein's regime posed no threat to the United States and that the Bush administration, by invading Iraq, cost America many friends around the world and "delivered to al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable."
The invasion of Iraq, Clarke writes, was "a completely unnecessary tangent" that invigorated the radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide and also blew the chance to strike a deadly blow against al Qaeda. By that reckoning, Jason Ford and other American men and women in service to their country died in Iraq for no good reason. That damning judgment answers Irene Ford's bitter questions.
Quibble with Clarke's assessment? What have we bought with the tremendous investment of American blood and treasure in Iraq? We have exchanged Hussein and his Baath Party thugs for today's identity politics being practiced by the Shiite Muslim majority, the minority Sunni Muslims and the Kurds. Even as our troops come under rocket attacks, we are busy sprucing up the Iraqi nation with jobs and public works projects that are the envy of America's cities.
We have liberated the likes of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, now the most important Shiite cleric in Iraq, who, despite our great sacrifices for his country, won't stoop to give American proconsul L. Paul Bremer or any other American a five-minute audience. Muslim clerics, increasingly influential in Iraq, haven't had it so good in decades, thanks to Bush war planners.
And what have the United States and its strategic Middle East ally Israel received in exchange? This from Sistani in response to the assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the terrorist group Hamas -- a source of the suicide bombings of Israeli civilians:
"This morning, in a terrible [one translation said "ugly"] crime committed by the occupying Zionist entity, the oppressed Palestinian People lost one of its bravest men of courage, the martyr [Yassin], may God have mercy on him, who committed his life to serving his land and his religion, and showed patience and resistance that cannot be equaled.
"We are in mourning brothers and sisters in dear Palestine and the rest of the Muslims, for this terrible disaster and great injury, which will encourage the sons of the Arab and Islamic nation to come together and unite, and work seriously about the ways to liberate our robbed land, and to take our stolen rights back successfully."
America's Jason Fords are fighting and dying for that?
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