RICHARD CLARKE AND KAREN HUGHES IN HARMONIC CONVERGEANCE!
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Richard Clarke's headline-making volume of self-praise might as well be titled, I've Suddenly Remembered I Knew It All Along. As yours truly noted yesterday (just scroll down), Clarke now claims he knew after September 11 it would be a colossal mistake to pursue Al Qaeda and attack Iraq simultaneously. I asked, Why didn't he say so at the time? Clarke left government about a month before the assault on Iraq began.
This means he had plenty of time to speak out, as a
private citizen, against the Iraq attack--and at that
moment, an antiwar statement by the president's own
counterterrorism advisor would have had tremendous impact
worldwide. Instead in the month before the Iraq war began,
Clarke did not oppose it.
Suddenly in 2004 he has remembered his intense antiwar
views--now that the political climate has shifted and
suddenly remembering your intense antiwar views is a good
way to sell a book.
But maybe in the month before the Iraq war, Clarke had
decided to hold his tongue and say nothing about his
former job? Um, not exactly. As New Republic super-intern
Anne O'Donnell points out, on resigning from the National
Security Council in February 2003, one month prior to the
attack on Iraq, Clarke quickly signed as an on-air
consultant to ABC News. During the month before the war,
Clarke made several appearances on national television. He
spoke in great detail regarding Iraq, Saddam, terrorism
intelligence, military tactics, even discussing by name
individual Republican Guard divisions and U.S. plans for
those divisions. So Clarke certainly wasn't holding his
tongue, he was yakking nonstop. And yet by the most
amazing and astonishing coincidence, Clarke apparently
didn't mention any of the strongly-held antiwar views he
has now suddenly remembered!
Here is a typical Clarke appearance, researched by O'Donnell, from ABC News on the night of March 21, 2003:
PETER JENNINGS. Talk a bit about this targeting of Saddam.
CLARKE. Well, I think if you could effectively decapitate the leadership, from, either by killing them or by removing their ability to communicate with the rest of the country, then it's going to be a lot easier to get these [Iraqi army] divisions to surrender. And after all, we don't want to have the entire country of Iraq hating us when we are done with this. We want them to feel liberated. We want them to join us in what is going to be a very limited, I hope, U.S. occupation. So there's a political strategy at work here that looks down the road beyond the fighting. And I think it makes a great deal of sense. But it's not clear yet whether or not it will work.
Now, lest anyone think that the anti-Bush Richard Clarke is the only one out there with a dubious volume of self-praise to sell, consider the pro-Bush Karen Hughes. Her book Ten Minutes From Normal, on sale today, boasts on its cover: "THE WOMAN WHO LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE TO PUT FAMILY FIRST, AND MOVED BACK HOME TO TEXAS." Um, except that Hughes just said goodbye to the family she put "first." Hughes is off for a six-week book tour, then resumes working for the Bush reelection campaign. There's no reason why a mother, or anyone, shouldn't do these things. But for Hughes to devote a book to praising herself for leaving Washington, when in fact she's been absent less than two years and is headed back, seems audacious bait-and-switch. Of course, since Hughes is in p.r., audacious bait-and-switch is her profession. |
