Bush bashers like Richard Clarke seem to suffer a self-inflicted blindness about the Bush Administrations policy on terrorism. To say that you think the president’s approach is wrong is not the same thing as saying he had no strategy. This is the fundamental dishonesty of the Richard Clarke attack. Michael Young at Reason.com cuts through the nonsense perfectly:

“It is difficult to fault Clarke for arguing that administration officials, especially Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, sought to use Sept. 11 to advance an agenda of war against Iraq. This was amply documented in Bob Woodward’s book BUSH AT WAR. However, what Wolfowitz’s critics have ignored is that his effort to implicate Iraq was the cornerstone of an ambitious strategy for how to respond to the Al Qaeda attacks that, in his mind, addressed the fundamentals of the terrorism problem.

For Wolfowitz, the threat posed to the United States came less from Al Qaeda per se than from the environments allowing such groups to form. As the Bush administration gauged the impact of Sept. 11, policymakers split into two camps: those who argued that the US must respond narrowly against Al Qaeda and its supporters, namely the Taleban in Afghanistan; and those who sought a broader mandate to reshape Middle Eastern countries regarded as terrorist breeding grounds.”

Disagreeing with the policy is one thing, but to say it didn’t exist is something else altogether.