WHITE HOUSE MEMOIR: Bush quickly sought Iraqi 9/11 link
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President Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator says that on Sept. 12, 2001, Bush told him to 'see if Saddam did this' and bristled when told the Iraqi leader apparently had no involvement.
BY BARTON GELLMAN
Washington Post Service
WASHINGTON - On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to a newly published memoir, President Bush wandered alone around the Situation Room in a White House emptied by the previous day's calamitous events.
Spotting Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism coordinator, Bush pulled him and a small group of aides into the dark-paneled room.
''Go back over everything, everything,'' Bush said, according to Clarke's account. ``See if Saddam did this.''
''But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this,'' Clarke replied.
``I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.''
Reminded that the CIA, FBI and White House staffs had sought and found no such link before, Clarke said, Bush spoke ''testily.'' As he left the room, Bush said a third time, ``Look into Iraq, Saddam.''
For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists.
His account -- in Against All Enemies, which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a major participant. The account was sharply disputed by a high-ranking Bush advisor.
Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months ago Sunday.
Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, ''failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks.'' The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein, Clarke writes, ``launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide.''
Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. 'The crisis was manufactured, and Bush political advisor Karl Rove was telling Republicans to `run on the war,' '' Clarke writes.
Clarke said in an interview that he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself among the critics.
''I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me,'' Clarke told CBS's 60 Minutes in an interview broadcast Sunday. ``But, frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism.''
On the same broadcast, deputy national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley said, ''We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred.'' In interviews for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account.
National security advisor Condoleezza Rice, in an opinion article published in The Washington Post today, writes: ``It would have been irresponsible not to ask a question about all possible links, including to Iraq -- a nation that had supported terrorism and had tried to kill a former president. Once advised that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the president told his national security council on Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11 would be to target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.''
White House and Pentagon officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity described Clarke's public remarks as self-serving and politically motivated.
Like former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who spoke out in January, Clarke said some of Bush's leading advisors arrived in office determined to make war on Iraq. Nearly all of them, he said, believed Clinton had been ''overly obsessed with al Qaeda.'' During Bush's first week in office, Clarke asked urgently for a Cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda. He did not get it -- or permission to brief the president directly on the threat -- for nearly eight months.
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