More damning charges from Clarke against Bushies:
Wednesday, Clarke blasted Bush for going to war with Iraq, saying the president’s decision was “my chief motivation” in writing his best-selling book criticizing the White House. He said Bush’s obsession with Saddam had short-circuited the larger war against terrorism.
“We had a window of opportunity after 9-11 to really root out terrorism,” Clarke said. “Instead, we took this excursion, going into Iraq, which had the exact opposite effect. It strengthened terrorism.”
He said he feared that U.S. invasions of Iran or Syria could be in the offing “if the same people are around. ... I fear that they haven’t learned from their mistake.”
‘Vulcans’ in charge
Clarke said the group of hard-line conservatives Bush put in charge of his defense and security structure had taken over the administration’s foreign policy, and “they all had Iraq on the mind from the day they came into office.”
The officials — a group Clarke said called itself “the Vulcans” — were led by Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, Clarke said, adding that their fervor to remove Saddam clouded their judgment about the consequences.
‘The president has to have the ultimate responsibility.’
— Richard Clarke
“I think they did a bad job of analysis,” Clarke said. “... My guess — and this is really sad — is that they never sat around and said, ‘What will the effect be on the recruitment of al-Qaida, on the empowerment of al-Qaida? What’s the negative, downside of going into Iraq?’”
But “the president has to have the ultimate responsibility,” Clarke said, accusing Bush of primarily being “interested in finishing the old man’s business” by ousting Saddam after his father ended the first Gulf War without changing the Iraqi government in 1991. Saddam was later accused of trying to assassinate the first President Bush.
Clarke lodged much the same charge against Cheney, who was defense secretary during the first Gulf War. Cheney, he said, “was interested in cleaning up a mistake that he made” when he recommended ending the ground war after only 100 days. |
