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Clarke's Folly

Gary Aldrich
Friday, Mar. 26, 2004

There's something oddly familiar about Richard Clarke's situation. He's a 30-year veteran of the federal government, with a keen interest in national security. He worked for presidents named Bush and Clinton, and spent considerable time in the White House.
Richard A. Clarke then resigned his position and wrote a book about his experiences in these administrations.

So did I - and my circumstances mirror Clarke's in many ways, but with wildly different outcomes. Despite Clarke's inconsistencies, he receives remarkable media attention, including extensive television exposure - valuable for book sales. He even participates as a "key" witness in the 9/11 commission hearings.

While Clarke is treated with great respect, his words are hailed by national leaders as gospel truth, forming the basis for headlines in newspapers across the country.

Yet the man keeps changing his story. Which one is true? When does Mr. Clarke tell the truth, and when does he lie?

I resigned from the FBI in 1995, after a five year assignment at the White House. I wrote no glowing letter of resignation to William Jefferson Clinton, praising him, as Clarke did for George W. Bush. Instead, I left in disgust and anger, as I had witnessed grave derelictions of duty on the part of our then-commander-in-chief.

I released my book, Unlimited Access-An FBI Agent Inside The Clinton White House, in 1996. In it, I made two major claims: first, Bill Clinton and his administration had been clueless and reckless with our national security; and second, that this recklessness represented a clear and present danger to our nation's safety.

As a matter of fact, I wrote in my book and in subsequent writings how surprised I was that the White House and the nation had not already been attacked by Middle Eastern terrorists. After 9/11 I spoke out, proclaiming that Bill Clinton was largely responsible because he and his hapless administrators made our nation a "soft target" by their actions and inactions. I cited examples and even named names.

My story never changed. I maintained my positions on Bill Clinton and was eventually proven accurate on every count - including another major allegation, that Clinton was a reckless womanizer.

When Unlimited Access came out, few in Washington cared much about national security. The Soviet Union had collapsed and the Hard-Left enjoyed the false theory that resources and attention to national security and defense could be redirected to more important matters, like gays in the military and national health care.

The National Security Counsel began tracking rain forest depletion and environmental changes, as well as world-wide poverty and food supplies. These were the priorities for Mr. Clarke's NSC. Moreover, since Clarke worked in the Clinton White House for eight long years, he knew this better than most.

Osama bin Laden attacked us over and over again, yet we sent troops to Kosovo and Haiti - where they remain today. How these countries had anything to do with national security, few can articulate. So why could our military travel there, but not to Afghanistan?

Yet when Mr. Clarke sums up national security performance in his book and in front of the TV cameras, Bill Clinton comes out a star, while George W. Bush is the goat.

Richard A. Clarke will sell a lot of books, and the Democrat base will enjoy a short, sweet moment. But Clarke will soon learn that the meager royalties from his inaccurate and misleading book about his career in the White House will serve as a poor substitute for the loss of respect from his professional associates.

The Democrats are using Clarke. My prediction is that Clarke will discover the hard way that after his 15 minutes of infamy - having told three different versions of the "truth" - his final destination will be obscurity and his final reward the shunning of his peers.

A year from now, Clarke won't be moaning about a president dragging him into a meeting - he'll instead complain that no significant person in Washington, D.C. will return his phone calls. Not even his "new friends" in the mainstream media.

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Sounds like a bunch of "SOUR GRAPES" to me.

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Dick Clarke: Hillary's Kind of Hawk

by Terence P. Jeffrey
Posted Mar 26, 2004

Reading former National Security Council aide Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies--Inside America's Terror War, one half expects the omnipresent author to describe himself showing up in Philadelphia in 1776 to draft the original version of the Declaration of Independence--only to have it hopelessly rewritten by right-wing dolts like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin.

By Clarke's account (see page 2 and page 6), he played a key role in many of the most significant national security crises of the last quarter-century. Things went well when his advice was heeded; disaster ensued when it was not.

The place one would not expect to find Clarke--from reading his book, anyway--is in a voting booth in 2000 pulling the lever for a Republican presidential candidate. But, testifying last week before the national commission probing the September 11 terrorist attacks, Clarke says he did just that.

"I'm not working for the Kerry campaign," Clarke protested when former Navy Secretary John Lehman suggested some might perceive Clarke as having a partisan agenda. "Last time I had to declare my party loyalty, it was to vote in the Virginia primary for President of the United States in the year 2000. And I asked for a Republican ballot."

Blaming America First

Hearing this on TV, I tried my best to suspend disbelief when I started reading Clarke's book. Perhaps it really was a serious national security study written by a hawkish Republican, who had public policy--not partisan political--differences with the Bush Administration.

Then I read Chapter 1. That's where Clarke, narrating the events of September 11, introduces Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Mrs. Cheney was more than just a family member who had to be protected," writes Clarke. "Like her husband, she was a right-wing ideologue and she was offering her advice and opinions in the bunker."

On the next page, Clarke says of the Vice President: "Below that surface of calm ran strong, almost extreme, beliefs. He had been one of the five most radical conservatives in Congress."

Make no mistake: The Cheneys are conservatives. But how likely do you think it is that an environmentalist Democratic aide in the Clinton White House would have referred to Tipper Gore as, say, an environmentalist wacko? Or noted that Al Gore had been one of the five most radical leftists in the Senate?

Answer that and you'll know how earnestly "Republican" is Richard Clarke.

In Against All Enemies, hagiographies of hallowed leftists are followed by demonizations of accursed conservatives.

If Lynn Cheney is the kind of Second Lady who would have the effrontery to offer an opinion in a bunker, what sort of First Lady was Hillary Clinton? Secretly saintly, implies Clarke.

He describes the scene at a hotel near Kennedy Airport, where President and Mrs. Clinton went to meet the families of victims of the TWA 800 disaster. "I opened the door to the next room, which had been set up as a chapel," writes Clark. "Alone in the room, on her knees, Mrs. Clinton was praying."

But when it came to piety, Hillary had nothing on Janet Reno. "She had shown incredible public courage in taking the blame for the disastrous siege of the religious cultists at Waco, Tex.," Clarke writes, referring to the incident in which Clinton's attorney general ordered the tear gas attack on the Branch Davidian compound that sparked the conflagration that resulted in the deaths of more than 70 people, including many children.

Taking credit for that showed "courage," says this "Republican." But John Ashcroft's manner of defending the Patriot Act is something else entirely. In Clarke's view, that understandably raised the specter of the Third Reich. Writes Clarke of Ashcroft: "The Attorney General, rather than bringing us together, managed to persuade much of the country that the needed reforms of the Patriot Act were actually the beginning of fascism."

Speaking of Evil Empires, Clarke even betrays ambivalence as to just how evil global Communism was.

Referring to Robert Gallucci, a member of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, Clarke casually states: "Gallucci and I had both been anti-Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s."

While comparing the War on Terror to the Cold War, he says: "In retrospect, some (particularly those born after 1970) believe America overreacted to the Cold War threat. At the time, however, it seemed an existential struggle, the depth of which is now difficult for many to recall or understand."

Oh, really? Who finds it difficult to understand that when a Godless empire aims thousands of nuclear warheads at your cities you are in "an existential struggle"? Only unreconstructed liberals--with whom this "Republican" Clarke obviously has deep empathy.

Partisans of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry may ludicrously persist in portraying this man who reached the apex of his career in the Clinton White House as a Republican hawk. But, in his book, Clarke himself vividly paints his vision for a Blame-America-First Aquarian Age--that age that might have been, he suggests, if only a Clinton had ruled again.

Drawing a contrast with George W. Bush's aggressive approach to the war on terror, Clark says: "Others (Clinton, the first Bush, Carter, Ford) might have tried to understand the phenomenon of terrorism, what led 15 Saudis and four others to commit suicide to kill Americans. Others might have tried to build a world consensus to address the root causes, while using the moment to force what had been lethargic or doubting governments to arrest known terrorists and close front organizations. One can imagine Clinton trying one more time to force an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, going to Saudi Arabia and addressing the Muslim people in a moving appeal for religious tolerance . . ."

Yeah, right, Dick. Then all of us "Republicans" could have sat down with Bill, Hillary and Osama bin Laden and sung endless choruses of Give Peace a Chance.

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The Sorry Mr. Clarke

From the April 5, 2004 issue: Richard Clarke's grandstanding did please its true intended audience--the New York Times.

by William Kristol
04/05/2004, Volume 009, Issue 29

"I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11. To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask--once all the facts are out--for your understanding and for your forgiveness."

--Richard Clarke, testifying before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004

RICHARD CLARKE can apologize to anyone he likes. He could have done so sooner. And he could have done so privately. The names of those killed on 9/11--and, for that matter, of those killed by al Qaeda in our African embassies, on the USS Cole, and on other occasions--have presumably been available to Clarke. Would the families of those who died have appreciated a personal letter from Clarke asking for their understanding and forgiveness? Perhaps a few would. The vast majority no doubt would have thought such an apology utterly unnecessary and inappropriate.

Clarke, who worked tirelessly against al Qaeda during the 1990s, is not responsible for the deaths on 9/11. Indeed, the families of those who died surely appreciate Clarke's great efforts, first to thwart al Qaeda, and then to bring the killers of their loved ones to justice. Surely they know of Clarke's sympathy for their loss. Surely the only apology that is owed--though it would presumably be rejected by the families--would be an apology from Osama bin Laden, just prior to his execution.

But Clarke's grandstanding did please its true intended audience. The writers at the New York Times loved it. After all, when Clarke apologized, they wrote, "it suddenly seemed that after the billions of words uttered about that terrible day, Mr. Clarke had found the ones that still needed saying." Indeed, "the only problem with his apology was that so few of those failures really seemed to be his." So presumably, according to the New York Times, everyone else in government who "failed" should also apologize.

No. In fact, what government officials owed the memory of those who died on 9/11--to ensure that they did not die in vain--was a greater determination to prosecute the war on terror than had been shown in the preceding eight months, and in the preceding eight years.

Clarke and the New York Times are certainly free to argue that the Bush administration has not done a good job in fighting the war on terror. They are free to argue that the war in Iraq was a mistake. But neither Clarke nor the New York Times has even attempted to make the case that the Bush administration bears any true moral responsibility for failing to avert al Qaeda's attack on 9/11. Shouldn't the New York Times trouble itself to make this case before it presumes to call for yet more inappropriate apologies?

Was no one at the Times aware of the following exchange between Clarke and commission member Slade Gorton?

GORTON: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this: Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?

CLARKE: No.

There have been occasions in the past when government officials properly took responsibility for actions under their direction that went terribly awry. Janet Reno accepted responsibility for the deaths in Waco in 1993. John Kennedy took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs in 1961. In those cases, apparently reckless U.S. government actions directly caused unnecessary deaths. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans. It would be no more appropriate for President Bush to apologize today than it would have been for President Roosevelt to apologize for Pearl Harbor. Richard Clarke's pseudo-apology has cheapened the public discourse.

--William Kristol

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Ah, how reassuring to see how frantically the right moves to discredit Clarke . . .

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See Dick Spin www.9-11commission.gov.

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Thank you McGentrix. A cool voice of reason here that neither puts a halo or devil's horns on the current or previous administration as neither deserve that.

There is only so much you or I or any one person or group or administration can focus on at any one time. Even after 9/11, some were complaining when the media reported the security alerts because "if we don't know what the actual threat is, there's nothing we can do about it, so why scare everybody to death about it?"

The Bush administration had been in office for eight months when 9/11 happened and, at that time, they were still trying to get all the necessary appointments into place and up to speed.

Nobody, but nobody, envisioned what happened on 9/11 except possibly the terrorists themselves. If the administration had launched an all out anti-terrorism campaign before 9/11, how much criticism would they have received for focusing on that instead of other more obvious domestic issues?

Is objectivity too much to ask for here?

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"the story of Mr Clarke" appears to be whatever story one side or the other deems to make public, however, it seems to me the "story" ought to be what Mr. Clarke offers as information, to be or not to be discredited.

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From where I sit, Clarke looks pretty darn good. Of course it doesn't really matter because the book is selling. Clarke isn't running for office.

What' great is that it is forcing Bush to deal with the difficult questions with his presidency.

The fact is that Bush invaded Iraq when it was clear that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. We were taking resources away from the "war on terrorism".

Clarkes role is to bring these issues in to the public and force Bush to respond. His credibility or motive doesn't matter. He is doing a great service to the American people.

Of course partisans on both sides will react. But it doesn't matter. Between Bush and Clarke only one of them is running for office.

Bush, Rice and the rest of them had better have a good answer to these issues rather than these partisan character assassinations. Clarke doesn't seem very vulnerable right now. He apologized and has nothing to lose.

I love it!

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ebrown_p wrote:

The fact is that Bush invaded Iraq when it was clear that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. We were taking resources away from the "war on terrorism".

But that's it in a nutshell. It's a war on terrorism. Not Al Qaeda. Saddam supported terrorism. Of that there can be no doubt.

If it were a war on Al Qaeda, I would agree that invading Iraq would be a bit out of place, but as it's a war on terrorism, it's not.

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Keep on saying this McGentrix. With Clarke's voice and yours we will get this idiot out of office.

I would point out that Bush used 9/11 to justify the war in Iraq (along with the WMD's). I think most American's would agree that after 9/11 Al Qaeda was a much more appropriate target.

But that's not the point I am making.

I love Clarke.

He is very bad for Bush ... and very good for America!

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ebrown_p wrote:

He is very bad for Bush ... and very good for America!

My thoughts exactly.

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re Gary Aldrich...take a peek at this LINK to get a notion of Gary's view on things.

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Quote:

Is objectivity too much to ask for here?

foxfyre...pick up the book and read it. It is not, as these pieces above, a series of ad hominems and innuendos strung together with punctuation, which really quite describes these bits posted by McG.

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Terrorism
Saddam supported families of suicide bombers in Palastine. The invasion of Iraq was to rid Israel of Iraq's threat to Israel.

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It's "All Things Clarke". No apostrophe. Very Happy

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Quote:

Dick Clarke: Good, Bad, and Ugly
From the April 5, 2004 issue: What Richard Clarke's record says about his credibility.
04/05/2004, Volume 009, Issue 29

The Good . . .

As the top National Security Council staffer on counterterrorism for the last decade--and a career national security bureaucrat for the last 30 years--Richard Clarke had a ringside seat from which to view the full catastrophe of Osama bin Laden's war on America. His efforts to stir a more forceful U.S. response to al Qaeda were described in these pages two months ago by Richard H. Shultz Jr. ("Showstoppers," Jan. 26, 2004). Here is Shultz's description of the frustrations Clarke faced:

When events finally impelled the Clinton administration to take a hard look at offensive operations, the push to pursue them came from the civilians of the National Security Council's Counterterrorism and Security Group.

One of the hardest of the hard-liners was the group's chief, Dick Clarke. For nearly a decade, this career civil servant began and ended his workday with the burgeoning terrorist threat to America. He knew in detail the danger the bin Ladens of the world posed, and it worried him greatly. Defensive measures were just not enough. "Clarke's philosophy was to go get the terrorists," one former senior Pentagon special operations official told me, "Go get them anywhere you can." . . .

Clarke was not alone. Mike Sheehan also pushed for assisting the Northern Alliance and striking al Qaeda with SOF [special forces]. Such measures worried the senior brass, who proceeded to weaken those officials by treating them as pariahs. That meant portraying them as cowboys, who proposed reckless military operations that would get American soldiers killed.

Sheehan explained: Suppose one civilian starts beating the drum for special operations. The establishment "systematically starts to undermine you. They would say, 'He's a rogue, he's uncooperative, he's out of control, he's stupid, he makes bad choices.' It's very damaging. . . . You get to the point where you don't even raise issues like that. If someone did, like me or Clarke, we were labeled cowboys, way outside our area of competence."

Several officials who served on the Joint Staff and in the Pentagon's special operations office remembered the senior brass characterizing Clarke in such terms. "Anything Dick Clarke suggested, the Joint Staff was going to be negative about," said one. Some generals had been vitriolic, calling Clarke "a madman, out of control, power hungry, wanted to be a hero, all that kind of stuff." In fact, one of these former officials emphasized, "when we would carry back from the counterterrorism group one of those SOF counterterrorism proposals, our job was to figure out not how to execute it, but how we were going to say no."

By turning Clarke into a pariah, the Pentagon brass discredited precisely the options that might have spared us the tragedy of September 11. And when Clarke fought back at being branded "wild" and "irresponsible," they added "abrasive" and "intolerant" to the counts against him.

Clarke was similarly well placed in the critical first year of the Bush administration. Let's fast forward to an August 2002 press briefing unearthed last week by Fox News's Jim Angle, when Clarke was still on the Bush NSC staff. Clarke was asked about accusations that animus to the Clinton administration had made the Bush administration unwilling to take suggestions from their predecessors on going after al Qaeda:

CLARKE: Over the course of the summer [of 2001, the Bush team] changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the Northern Alliance assistance. And then changed the strategy from one of rollback with al Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline. . . .

ANGLE: You're saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that's correct.

There was every reason, then, given Clarke's unique vantage point, to expect that his memoirs would one day provide an authoritative account of what went wrong (and what went right) in the long war with al Qaeda.

The Bad . . .

The appearance of Clarke's Against All Enemies last week betrayed those expectations. First, the simple fact that Clarke, who resigned in January 2003, should rush to publish his volume before the end of Bush's first term is a precedent-setting act of bad faith from a National Security Council staffer who reports on conversations with the president and his national security adviser.

It's no surprise that the Washington press corps hasn't lingered over this breach of trust. They were no doubt the recipients of so many leaks from Clarke through the years that it would be an act of deep ingratitude for them to criticize the man now. It's a bit shortsighted of alleged defenders of good government (viz. the New York Times editorial page) not to notice the fact that Clarke has singlehandedly all but guaranteed a partisan purge of national security staff in future transitions.

And the Ugly

But the real disappointment is that whole chunks of Clarke's book sound as if they were dictated by Sidney Blumenthal, the most partisan and conspiratorial of the Clintonites. When Clarke says in his preface that he will tell the story of "Bill Clinton, who identified terrorism as the major post-Cold War threat and acted to improve our counterterrorism capabilities; who (little known to the public) quelled anti-American terrorism by Iraq and Iran and defeated an al Qaeda attempt to dominate Bosnia; but who, weakened by continued political attack, could not get the CIA, the Pentagon, and FBI to act sufficiently to deal with the threat"--he is echoing the thesis of Blumenthal, whose tedious 2003 memoir The Clinton Wars blamed all of Clinton's failures in combatting al Qaeda on Clinton's political foes. Both books tell some of the same supposedly Clinton-exculpating anecdotes:

What was particularly frustrating was that Clinton had pulled Joint Staffs Chairman Hugh Shelton and me aside after the Cabinet Room meeting, saying to the former Special Forces commander, "Hugh, what I think would scare the **** out of these al Qaeda guys, more than any cruise missile . . . would be the sight of U.S. commandoes, Ninja guys in black suits, jumping out of helicopters into their camps, spraying machine guns. Even if we don't get the big guys, it will have a good effect." Shelton looked pained. He explained that the camps were a long way away from anywhere we could launch a helicopter raid. Nonetheless, America's top military officer agreed to "look into it." (Clarke, Against All Enemies, pp. 189-190)

Still frustrated, President Clinton tried to get the Pentagon to think about a Special Forces operation. In late 1999, he suggested to [Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh] Shelton, "You know, it would scare the **** out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp. It would get us enormous deterrence and show those guys we're not afraid." But Shelton "blanched": The generals subsequently argued to the NSC that a small operation was too risky: "The White House had little recourse; it would not work to order the military to undertake a mission it believed to be suicidal." (Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars, p. 661)

Then there's the condescending character assassination (also a Blumenthalian touch): "As I briefed [National Security Adviser Condi Rice] on al Qaeda, her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard of the term before." (She had in fact heard of and used the term.) Clarke's new fans on the Bush-bashing left preposterously demand that his book deserves serious rebuttal. Fine. To paraphrase Clarke: As we read his book, he gives us the impression that he is as obsessed with destroying the Bush presidency as he once was with destroying al Qaeda. Too bad.

The Weekly Standard

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Intense
I am getting to the point where I will not speak to Right Wingers in person. Soon I will not respond or reply to them online. I am starting to intensely dislike them. Evil or Very Mad

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caprice wrote:

It's "All Things Clarke". No apostrophe.

caprice, I was going to point that out, but I'm used to conservatives not being able to spell, even at the highest levels of government.

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Read
They don't like to read either. It was amusing on Tweety's show when a Right Winger said that he didn't believe anything in Clarke's book and Tweety asked him had he read it. Uh...he had not.

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