Next week promises to be Richard Clarke’s 15 minutes. But, from the sounds of it, it’s also going to be a pain in the side that will become part of the Dem mantra during the course of the campaign-more effective, but in the grand tradition of a Paul O’Neill.
An insider gives me a little Clarke backstory:
Richard Clarke was a fairly low level functionary in the Reagan and
Bush 41 admins before rising in the Clinton admin to a virtual cabinet
level post of national counter-terrorism coordinator, a job that really
no longer exists because strategy of the current admin is to eradicate
al Qaeda, not merely to contain it with extraditions and prosecutions —
which means it is now in the hands of the NSC & DOD, where it should
have been all along. When Bush II came in, among the first things he
directed was an entire rethinking of the anemic Clinton anti-terror
strategy (at the actual cabinet and NSC level — meaning Veep, Rice,
Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and their deputies), which demoted Clarke. BUT, rather than firing Clarke the prez kept him on with
the understanding that he should continue doing his important work while
the new strategy was being developed and implemented (which took some
time both b/c of the nature of the task and the happenstance that the
controversy over the election meant that a lot of important admin
staffing was not completed until well into summer 2001).
Clark is bitter at his fall from the perch, and that is now coming
home to roost. He has written a book that is about to be released and
will be absolutely devastating because it gives the media exactly what
they want: someone they can portray as an “insider” who will explicitly
say (a) that the Bush admin did not take terrorism seriously in the
run-up to 9/11; (b) that he told Bush right after 9/11 (I believe he
says it happened on 9/12) that there was no connection b/w al Qaeda and
Iraq — and therefore could be no connection b/w Saddam and 9/11 — at
which point Bush, angrily, told him to check again and next time come
back w/ the right answer (i.e., essentially to make up a connection
whether it was there or not); (c) that the Afghanistan operation was not
the raging success it appeared to be; and (d) that the decision to take
the war on terror to Iraq, aside from being based on a false premise
that Iraq had anything to do with terrorism, badly compromised the
actual war on terror by diverting essential resources. Lesley Stahl and
60 Minutes will be doing a segment on it…and
Clarke is already making the rounds (he was the no. 2 story — after the
anniversary of the Iraq invasion — on CBS evening news Friday night).