Clarke Book Reignites Debate Over Iraq Invasion
___________________________________________________
Analysts Are Split on Whether Move Hurt War on
Terrorism
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
March 27, 2004
John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11
commission, put it bluntly to former counterterrorism
chief Richard A. Clarke when he testified publicly
last week: Why did his earlier, private testimony to
the commission not include the harsh criticism leveled
at President Bush in his book?
"There's a very good reason for that," Clarke replied.
"In the 15 hours of testimony, no one asked me what I
thought about the president's invasion of Iraq. And
the reason I am strident in my criticism of the
president of the United States is because by invading
Iraq . . . the president of the United States has
greatly undermined the war on terrorism."
The furious charge and countercharge between Clarke
and the White House last week has largely obscured
this central complaint by Clarke. The commission
investigating the 2001 attacks is not charged with
probing this question, so little of the public
testimony in recent days dwelled on Iraq. Politically,
however, it is potentially just as important for Bush
to deal with that assertion as it is for him to
address the claim that he was not properly focused on
the al Qaeda threat in the first eight months of his
presidency.
Clarke, in his book, echoes other accounts, such as
Ron Suskind's book on former Treasury secretary Paul
H. O'Neill, that key administration officials appeared
unduly focused on Iraq in the months before the Sept.
11 attacks -- and then leapt to the conclusion that
Iraq was somehow involved.
Clarke depicts the president as tersely demanding that
his staff look for links between the Sept. 11 attacks
and Iraq. He charges that, for Bush and his advisers,
attacking Iraq was "a rigid belief, received wisdom, a
decision already made and one that no fact or event
could derail." In the end, through the Iraq war, "we
delivered to al Qaeda the greatest recruitment
propaganda imaginable."
Clarke's complaint resonates with some other former
administration officials. Rand Beers, who served as
counterterrorism chief after Clarke, has voiced the
same complaint and is now foreign policy adviser to
Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry
(Mass.). Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and
Middle East specialist who left Bush's National
Security Council staff a year ago, also agrees.
"Clarke's critique of administration decision-making
and how it did not balance the imperative of finishing
the job against al Qaeda versus what they wanted to do
in Iraq is absolutely on the money," Leverett said.
He said that Arabic-speaking Special Forces officers
and CIA officers who were doing a good job tracking
Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and other al Qaeda
leaders were pulled out of Afghanistan in March 2002
to begin preparing for the war against Iraq. "We took
the people out who could have caught them," he said.
"But even if we get bin Laden or Zawahiri now, it is
two years too late. Al Qaeda is a very different
organization now. It has had time to adapt. The
administration should have finished this job."
Jessica Stern, Harvard University lecturer and author
of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants
Kill," also agrees with Clarke. "It was a distraction
on the war on terrorism and made it more difficult to
prosecute because the al Qaeda movement used the war
in Iraq to mobilize new recruits and energize the
movement," she said. "And we apparently sent Special
Forces from Afghanistan, where they should have been
fighting al Qaeda, to Iraq."
But Eliot Cohen, director of strategic studies at the
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced
International Studies and an advocate of attacking
Iraq, argues that Clarke's analysis wrongly assumes
the battle against terrorism paralyzes the government
when it comes to waging other wars. He said that if
one assumes that the fight against terrorism is a
multi-year effort that could stretch decades, then
"there is nothing the U.S. government can do for 30
years but fight al Qaeda." He noted that the bulk of
the fighting in Iraq was carried out by military
units, such as the 101st Airborne, that were not
involved in Afghanistan.
Cohen agreed, however, that a war the scale of the
Iraq invasion could divert the attention of senior
officials from other issues, such as fighting
terrorism. Pat Lang, who was head Middle East and
South Asia intelligence in the Defense Intelligence
Agency for seven years, said: "When you commit as much
time and attention and resources as we did to Iraq,
which I do not believe is connected to the worldwide
war against the jihadis, then you subtract what you
could commit to the war on terrorism. You see that
especially in the Special Forces commitment, as we
have only so many of them."
The Bush administration has long argued that the
campaign against Iraq was a continuation of the war on
terrorism. In the past week, administration officials
were generally not asked direct questions about
whether the war interfered with the campaign against
terrorists, but have tried to rebut the charge that
officials were focused on Iraq even as they launched a
war against Afghanistan.
Clarke's description of the discussions about Iraq's
possible involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks is
generally consistent with other accounts, such as the
one in the book, "Bush at War," by Washington Post
Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward. Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell, in his public testimony before
the commission Tuesday, confirmed that Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz -- a forceful
advocate of attacking Iraq -- "raised the issue of
whether or not Iraq should be considered for action
during this time."
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in an
interview with network correspondents Wednesday, said,
"The president asked if Iraq was complicit. Anybody
should have asked whether Iraq was complicit given our
history with Iraq." But, she added, Bush was told by
CIA Director George J. Tenet before they went to Camp
David the weekend after the attacks "there was no
evidence of that."
Woodward, in "Bush at War," wrote that the president
ended the debate at Camp David that weekend by saying,
"I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to
strike them now. I don't have the evidence at this
point."
Clarke also caused a stir last week by saying that
Bush, in his secret directive ordering the strike
against Afghanistan six days after Sept. 11, also told
the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an
invasion of Iraq. The Washington Post had reported on
this directive more than a year ago, generating no
complaint from the administration. But in the context
of the furor over Clarke, administration officials
said the Iraq order actually involved contingency
plans if Iraq tried to take advantage of the fact the
United States was fighting in Afghanistan.
"The idea that we were somehow sitting there thinking,
'Boy, we really wish we could do Iraq, not
Afghanistan,' is just patently false," Rice said.
But Woodward, whose book was based in large part on
notes taken at National Security Council meetings,
does not mention that the Iraq discussion involved
such contingencies. Rather, Woodward reports
extensively on an intense debate among senior
officials whether an invasion was necessary shortly
after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Moreover, a senior administration official, in an
interview with The Washington Post more than a year
ago, said Pentagon officials used the language
contained in Bush's Afghanistan directive to begin
planning for an invasion of Iraq.
Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.
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