EDITOR’S NOTE: This editorial appears in the (forthcoming) April 19, 2004, issue of National Review.
Richard Clarke, the former Clinton and Bush counterterrorism official who has become famous by criticizing President Bush, is a complicated case. On one hand, he was one of the more acute officials in the Clinton administration. He consistently warned about the threat of al-Qaeda and pushed for more aggressive action against it. In the early days of the Bush administration, he was also a strong voice for action. On the other hand, Clarke has now made himself an anti-Bush partisan willing to skate over important facts and offer tendentious interpretations of events to cast the Bush team in the worst possible light. The stench of opportunism is unmistakable around Clarke. It emanates primarily not from his book and its marketing, but from his liberal admirers.
Make no mistake: Clarke’s essential case against Bush is that he continued Clinton’s policy too long. Bush didn’t bomb and pour resources into CIA covert action soon enough. This would make the eager liberal embrace of Clarke, uh, counterintuitive, if it weren’t that the operating principle of the Left has become “whatever hurts Bush . . .” Should the Bush team have acted on Clarke’s ideas for Afghanistan, such as pumping aid to the Northern Alliance, sooner? Yes. But as Clarke himself has said, acting on these proposals would not have prevented 9/11. Nor would more high-level meetings in the summer of 2001 likely have thwarted the plot, as Clarke suggests. Until 9/11, the U.S. government suffered from systemic problems that kept it from effectively dealing with a terror threat on its own shores. The Patriot Act has helped to change that, but it is nonetheless almost universally reviled by Dick Clarke’s new fans. What’s that smell?
In his eagerness to zing Bush, Clarke belies his reputation as a serious analyst of terrorism. He told Lesley Stahl of CBS that the attack on Spain is evidence that the invasion of Iraq has backfired. This is absurd. Al-Qaeda committed acts of terrorism all through the 1990s and on September 11, while the U.S. was happy to keep “containing” Saddam. Some re sources may have temporarily been diverted from the hunt for bin Laden to the Iraq invasion, but the Iraq war overwhelmingly involved U.S. forces that never would have been involved in a bin Laden manhunt. In any case, the search for the Qaeda leader is on again in full force, mainly because it’s springtime in Afghanistan and President Musharraf of Pakistan finally seems ready to scour the tribal areas of his country.
Clarke and his allies insufficiently appreciate the long-term benefit of taking an Arab country away from radicalism and creating an oasis of decent government there. They make a fetish of the alleged statelessness of al-Qaeda. Yet if the terror group does not have a direct sponsor, in the manner of other terror groups, that does not mean that states-and the general geopolitical situation in the Middle East-are irrelevant to its health. As David Frum puts it, “If the Saudis had cut off the flow of funds to al-Qaeda, if Afghanistan had denied al-Qaeda its territory, if Pakistan had not formed a tacit alliance with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, if radical governments like Iraq had not incited anti-American and anti-Western extremism, and if moderate governments like Egypt had not appeased it-minus all these ifs, al-Qaeda would never have become the menace it has become.”
The White House has taken almost as much heat for fighting back against Clarke as it has for the substance of his allegations. Administration officials clearly felt that Clarke’s charges were deeply unfair, which they are, and thought that they had no option but to take him on aggressively. There was a cost to this. The impulse to defend Bush’s record kept officials from acknowledging forthrightly that they, like their predecessors, had underestimated the terrorist threat prior to 9/11. Their counterarguments sometimes appeared at odds-Cheney said Clarke was not “in the loop on a lot of this,” while Rice said he was. (The confusing truth is that he was a little of both-less influential than he had been in the Clinton administration, but still an important player.) By fighting hand-to-hand with Clarke, the White House inevitably lost some of its prestige. The gravity of Clarke’s allegations and the sympathetic play given them in the media, however, gave the White House little choice but to push back. The administration’s actions were clearly not driven wholly by political considerations: It took a beating for insisting for days, on separation-of-powers grounds, that Condoleezza Rice could not testify before the 9/11 commission in public.
How will the Clarke controversy play over the long term? Bush’s advantage is that few people genuinely believe he is weak on terror. The most important question in the campaign will be who can best prosecute the war going forward. To win that argument, Bush need only stand his ground. Defend the idea that the War on Terror is indeed a war. Preserve the Patriot Act. Stand by the distinction between enemy combatants and normal criminal defendants. Persevere in Iraq. Repeat as necessary.