Centerfield

Well done. Very good points made and illustration of.

Agree, gives our views more weight.

Janus

I saw the 60 minutes piece. Clarke does not strike me as a democratic partisan, and in fact he served under Reagan and Bush prior to Clinton.

What is he? An extreme hawk on terrorism of longstanding. The fact that he may now be engaging in some opportunistic timing in publishing a book does ZERO to discredit the merits, whatever they may be, of his charges. Clearly Clarke is steamed that no one in the government with genuine power ever really took his viewpoints seriously enough to deal directly with the threat. The guy has good reason to be angry, IMO.

But the basis of Clarke's thesis is that we should have done much more much sooner and averted 9/11. I doubt that the political will necesary for such things to happen existed prior to 9/11, whether it was in the Bush or Clinton admins, or earlier.

In the 60 min pice, Clark described how the Bush admin seemed to be fixed on Iraq as #2 on the hit list as of 9/12 or shortly thereafter. I don't doubt that, and I was always suspicious of the public rationale by the Bush admin. But that's not the same as saying that targeting Iraq was nonsensical, or has not had positive effects.

Here's the thing that gets me: during the 60 minute piece, the one question that I think is of genuine interest wasn't directly asked. Here we've got a guy who saw it all coming and understands the threat of terrorism. My question: "If you had been made president on 9/12, what specific steps would you have proposed we take in response to terrorism? And what would you do now?"

because that

bk,

I don't think the point is that they made Iraq their #2 priority on September 12th. It is the suggestion that they wanted to keep Iraq as their #1 priority. Rumsfeld immediately suggested that they attack Iraq rather than Afghanistan where the threat had origininated. And in Clarke's description of the threat analysis they prepared afterwards, there seems to be an unwillingness to deal with any threat but Iraq, despite the more immediate threat of al Qaeda. It is to the administration's credit that they did not attack Iraq but directed their efforts toward Afghanistan, but there are some serious questions raised over the priorities in the wake of 9/11 and in the eventual decision to redirect resources from pursuing al Qaeda after Afghanistan and toward Iraq.

I look at this and see an unwillingness to accept intelligence that does not agree with a previously formulated view of the world, and that is a very dangerous thing.

Regime change in Iraq has been the policy of the United States since 1990. Bush's policy was no different that Clinton's or his father's... he is simply the only President that did anything about it. If it was the policy of the Bush administration to take out Saddam Hussein before 9/11 than this American has no problem with that... Their failure was not being honest with the American people and creating the whole ridiculouos WMD excuse.

I don't think anything of Clarke either way, but I have a serious problem with listening to a guy's story, and believing it, when he stands to gain financially.

As someone who has worked for elected officials I am offended by people who claim loyalty to their job and then turn around and write a book about their former employer's mistakes, especially when no laws are being broken. Clarke took advantage of people that trusted him simply because he is pissed off, and I would submit that although he has a right to be angry, he has lost all credibility by going about expressing his feelings the way that he has.

This is precisely why I have little respect for George Stephanapolous. Paul O'Neil was one of my heroes until the day he wrote that book and compromised his integrity. These people are out for nobody but themselves.

I look at this and see an unwillingness to accept intelligence that does not agree with a previously formulated view of the world...

Well, this is normal. EVERYONE does this. The first reaction to any suggestion that one's formulations of the world are incorrect is to resist. It is rare indeed that one substantially change's one's views AT ALL, let alone immediately. Like you said, it's to the admin's credit that they ultimately decided to deal with Afghanistan first. So clearly they DID alter their views somewhat. So to that extent, their process worked.

Matthew, I find your characterization a little bit peculiar. It seems like you are saying that loyalty must always be foremost. What are the circumstances under which one can serve loyally for a long time and then decide that they can no longer work within a system because it's broken, dysfunctional, etc? Because either you are saying that this is not a judgement that can ever honorably be made, or you are suggesting that there's some other reasonable vehicle for getting out your viewpoint other than, say, writing a book.

I mean, if you view your viewpoint as too important to continue to be ignored, doesn't it make sense to give that viewpoint a big splash if you go independent?

Understand that i am not dismissing the possibility that an effort such as O'Neil's or Clarke's COULD be nothing more than a cynical betrayal and sell-out. But what's the criteria for deciding which it is? Is it always the latter in your view?

My point is that whenever someone quits an organization and writes a tell-all book, they are open to the charge that they are just a disgruntled former employee, that it's sour grapes, that they are cashing in, etc. But surely this is not always true. Surely in some cases a messed-up organization deserves to be exposed. So the decision about whether the tell-all is a cynical cash-out or a needed expose should be made on a case by case basis, at least in my view. And I don't think the possibility that one stands to profit is good enough evidence. Especially when you consider that the act of being a whistleblower usually portends or follows the end of some career.

What Matthew said, and then some. As one who works for and with elected officials, and has been an elected official, Clarke's accusations struck me as little more than unverifiable whining and back-biting by a disgruntled and demoted former hack bureaucrat. Lacking serious and reliable verification, his accusations have about as much credibility as Gore's claim to have invented the Internet.

Not a word during the interview from CBS that their parent company, Viacom, also owns the publisher of Clarke's book. Nope, no conflict of interest there. Not a word about Clarke's best buddy and long-time colleague Rand Beers being Homeland Security advisor to the Kerry campaign. Nope, no conflict there!

My favorite passage from the book so far is Clarke's psychic ability to read Condi Rice's entire mind, based on a single facial expression on a single occasion. That she might have thought of him as a bug on his way out, or had gas from her lunch burrito that day, just never seems to cross Clarke's mind. Mostly my impression of Clarke's bloviating is that there doesn't seem to be very much of anything there.

When reading assertions such as Clarke's, it's helpful to ask yourself how much of what is being said would make it into a court of law as actual hard evidence--and what other hard evidence is available to either corraborate it, or impeach it.

But of course, it's election season, so whatever fits our predetermined prejudices will be accepted as gospel, and whatever doesn't will be dismissed as steer manure. There's a lot of steer manure gospel running around nowadays, in all directions. (How many rabid rightists still think Vince Foster and Ron Brown were killed by mysterious Clintonista hit squads?)

I prefer hard evidence, not inflated innuendo.

Tully,

per your request for "hard evidence" over inflated innuendo, I submit this link to the Center for American Progress's timeline of Bush's lack of attention to counterterrorism efforts, made up entirely of Department of Justice documents.

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=39039

You're welcome.

I respect Matthew's point about loyalty, and I think it applies to Paul O'Neil, who had no urgent reason to write a book that attacks his boss over economic policy.

But the correct handling of terrorism is so important that it trumps all loyalty except to the country itself. If someone suppressed information critical to national security to protect their current or former boss, I would call that treason.

Additional "hard evidence" regarding the Bush administration's lack of attention to counterterrorism efforts:

- The Administration has defended its negligence in the face of pre-9/11 terror warnings by claiming it set up a counter-terrorism task force in May of 2001 - but the task force never actually met.
Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040317-3.html

- The Administration is simultaneously claiming that it never downgraded counter-terrorism at the same time it is trying to discredit Richard Clarke by noting that the White House demoted his counterterrorism office from the Cabinet level position it occupied under the previous Administration.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/22/ltm.04.html

- The Administration is denying Richard Clarke's assertion that Iraq planning took place immediately on 9/11, despite previous reports corroborating this account.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtml
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/oneill_charges_040113.html

- The Administration tried to downgrade and slash for counter-terrorism before 9/11 - a significant departure from the previous Administration who labeled counterterrorism a "Tier One" priority in its strategic plan, and who increased the counterterrorism budget by 13.6% 1999, 7.1% in 2000 and 22.7% in 2001.
Source: http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=39039

In case you haven't read them, Condi Rice'
comments on this topic in the
Washington Post are of interest:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13881-2004Mar21.html

As has been said here and elsewhere, it's so easy to armchair quarterback with 20-20 hindsight. At this point, I really don't know how much I care who is to blame for whatever went wrong. I am more concerned that the administration find out HOW and WHY 9/11 happened and take the necessary steps to plug whatever intelligence gaps existed that allowed it to happen.

Heather,

I agree. I don't necessarily think these charges by Clarke are a big deal. But the orchestrated reaction of the Bush illustrates to me how they are living in a bubble, and can't even accept criticism by a hawk like Clarke.

It reminds me of how the Cinton Administration went into slime mode against Gary Aldrich when his book exposing their peccadilloes came out.

No "thank you's" here, Jeremy. All I found in your links was more Clarke butt-covering, vague inference juggling, unverifiable partisan rumor-mongering, and a few demonstrable and outrageous lies. (To be fair, I can find much the same things with a different slant by going to the right-wing sites.) As I said, inflated innuendo. If that's what passes with you for "hard evidence, " I suggest you avoid a career in law enforcement.

My fave is the CAP stuff, the Center for American Progress, a self-proclaimed "non-partisan" organzation staffed and run by such fierce, heroic, and free-thinking non-partisan independents as John Podesta (former Clinton Chief of Staff), Morton Halperin (radical anti-war activist, avowed Marxist, and Clinton Pentagon appointee), and Robert Boorstin (Clinton staffer and speechwriter), all of whom are, coincidentally, the reported prime operatives behind George Soros' plans to use his bajillions to buy the election and stop Bush. Can't get anymore independent and unbiased than that, can we?

The CAP hack/attack piece I could spend pages dissecting for selective citation, lack of supporting evidence, and overall irrelevance, but I LOVE the timeline! The CAP timeline and dating tries to make the FBI budget request look like it came BEFORE the 9/11 attack by placing it in August 2001 of the timeline. But the budget request was actually made a full year LATER, in August of 2002, AFTER 9/11, and was for a 50% overall increase in the total FBI budget, with ALL of the increase request earmarked for counter-terrorism. (In gov't, we call this the "Wish List" budget approach--in a crisis, ask for the solar system and maybe you'll get the moon.) Instead the FBI got an 18% boost in their overall 2003 budget--over $540 million extra--ALL of which was earmarked for counter-terrorism. This is misrepresented by Podesta, Halperin, and crew as a Bush admin attempt to "downgrade and slash [funds] for counter-terrorism before 9/11." Uh-huh. Yawn. Love that believability factor. Ya wanna buy this watch? It's a Rolex, I swear! Only $20!

There are lots of weaknesses in the Bush admin's performance and policies over the last three years, places where he is eminently vulnerable, including Iraq NOW and the world situation NOW (and Medicare and coporate giveaways and deficit spending and gay-bashing and...). But the Left is so fixated on being right about Bush and pre-invasion Iraq that they're still fighting the last war instead of fighting this one or planning for the next one, and grasping at any related straw they can put a spin on. Not a good sign for White House regime change this fall.

I just heard Michael Isikoff on FOXnews say that Clarke is filling out the details of a story that is already fairly well documented.

As Isikoff wrote the original Lewinsky story that Drudge leaked, my impression he is a sworn enemy of the Clinton camp. This adds further credibility to Clarke.

BK,

The line I draw, and I fully understand that it is my line, is pretty simple. If Clarke wrote a book when Bush was out of office, I would have no problem with that. It is right that we disect the actions of our leaders and learn from history, but Clarke waited till a time when his book would get a lot of play and a lot of press.

I also would have not had a problem with Clarke if their was indication that the law was broken. Elliot Richardson is one of my heroes in life and he wrote many books discussing his time with Nixon. The difference is that Nixon abused his power and Richardson was writing about how he, as a civil servant, chose to walk away rather than break the oath he took to uphold the constitution.

Clarke simply disagrees with the policies of the Administration... the policies that are contrary to the ones he proposed, and I will never believe that timing did not play a major roll in his decision to make his disagreement public.

When you work for an elected official you do so with the understanding that person may make decisions you personally oppose. You have every right to walk away from that position if you so choose, but in my opinion you cross the line and break a trust that you swore to, by publicly complaining about disagreements you had with your former employer while he or she still holds office. Unless you have a legal duty to diclose information you should keep your mouth shut.

The only thing worse than Clinton lying about public testimony, or Bush about WMDs, or Reagan about weapon exchanges are the hacks in their administrations that swore loyalty and then backed out when it benefited them politically and financially. I simply cannot take seriously, the word of a man who swore an allegiance to a President only to write a book that is released eight months before that President stands for re-election.

This is the centerfield? Where's Condy Rice's response?

Clarke's story seems to ignore the facts of what the Bush administration actually did. I certainly can't imagine that there would have been any support for attacking the Taliban prior to 9/11. Clarke is selling a book and trying to paint himself as a Cassandra, but before 9/11 he would have been attacked as a crank by the media that is now promoting him in order to denigrate Bush. We got all kinds of grief for proceeding without the U.N. even after 9/11. Do you think they would have backed us in deposing the Taliban before then?

I also think that the idea that overthrowing Saddam didn't advance the war on terror is pretty short-sighted. If you think about it, what we have to do to combat terrorism is to deny it a hiding place. That means convincing the states who have sheltered and supported it that that is dangerous to their own health. Let's see, we had already moved in Afghanistan. Who should be next? Iran? Too big. Syria? Not that big a threat. Iraq? It was already weakened by the first Gulf War. It was continuing to fire missiles at our plane protecting the no-fly zones where Saddam had already used nerve gas on the Kurds. He was playing games with the U.N. inspectors and repeatedly violating the ceasefire agreement he had signed.

Iraq occupies a strategic position in the area where these groups began. Establishing democracy may prove overly ambitious, but the success of the strategy has shown up in Libya's abandonment of its WMD program. In Syria protestors are speaking up against their own Baathist regime. Pakistan is helping us in hunting terrorists. And we don't know anything about what our Special Forces are doing, but I have little doubt that they are proceeding apace.

Don't forget what we have learned about our allies and the international order. Critical members of the U.N. Security Council were bought off by Saddam and the U.N. itself was corrupted by his manipulation of the "Oil for Food" to allow him to continue to bribe politicians and journalists and to continue to build palaces while his people were denied the benefits of the program. Having seen the mass graves and the torture chambers his regime maintained, I can't understand why people are so convinced that Iraq wasn't a valid target.

Well, actually, I do understand why. It's called an election year. And Clarke has been played for a patsy. He can't really believe that Kerry would be any more hawkish and decisive than Bill Clinton, and he seems to still think we need to be aggressive. Would Kerry send troops into the tribal areas of Pakistan to root out bin Laden? Would the U.N. approve doing so?
Don't make me laugh.

My girlfriend and I caught the 60 Minutes piece and were musing about it during the breaks, and we both had the same opinion-- it wasn't a bombshell, but Richard Clarke seemed credible, the kind of disciplined, straight-laced, show-up-for-work-and-do-a-good-job public servant that you'd want to have in charge of a mission-critical element of policy. I saw no basis whatsoever to charge him as partisan.

I suspect a lot of us on this board saw a lot of ourselves in him; we may have political proclivities in one direction or another, but above all we covet a leadership team in the Executive Branch that can do their jobs right. This IMHO was Clarke's only MO, and I came off with nothing but admiration for him and his candor.

That being said, while Clarke had few kind words for the current Administration, I don't think this is quite so damning for Bush and the Republicans as many people depict it. It will hurt him some, but its chief effect will be to cast a vast penumbra of doubt upon his Svengali-like advisors (chiefly Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) who were so distracted by Iraq and baying for Saddam's blood that they all but ignored the real threats... and it will also raise further questions and inspire justified criticisms about the Clinton Administration.

Bill Clinton didn't fiddle while Rome burned, but he appears to have passed up several opportunities to nip al-Qaeda in the bud. And it was under Clinton's watch, after all, that Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubaydah, and the rest in the Usual Gang of Idiots were allowed to grow a fledgling pack of nutball fringe radicals into a lethal organization which trained many thousands of fighters in its camps. Whatever Clinton's accomplishments, he will have the stain of grossly failing to appreciate the al-Qaeda threat and allowing it to develop into something extremely dangerous under his watch.

So there's enough blame to go around. Bush Sr.-- who blundered by semi-permanently garrisoning the troops in Saudi Arabia and instituting the half-baked sanctions regime-- Bill Clinton, and George Bush Jr. all majorly dropped the ball on al-Qaida. The latest Bush Administration seems to have been disturbingly disengaged in comparison to what would have been expected, but to Bush's credit following the 9/11 attacks, he *did* manage to ignore the lunatic ravings of Wolfowitz et al. baying to attack Iraq. This would have been an utter catastrophe, since it would have left al-Qaeda almost unscathed and attacked others (the Baathists in Iraq) who had squat to do with the attacks; this would have been akin to suffering a torching of your house by a street gang, then walking down the block and trashing one of your innocent neighbor's houses as revenge! Fortunately, Bush listened to Powell and went after al-Qaeda before turning his attention to Iraq, though he didn't finish the job and now has quite possibly made things worse with the morass in the Mesopotamian Desert.

And Rick,

I understand terrorism is important, but the "it's for the country" line could be used by anyone. Is that to mean that anyone from Bush's administration who now comes out against a decision he made regarding the war on terror should immediately be judged credible if they mutter the words: "it is for the country."

And Jeremy,

The day that some quotes from the press regarding a story that broke less than 48 hours ago is considered "hard evidence," is the day we might as well all start waving the white flag. Could your Kerry bias be even more evident? Are you going to provide some background behind those statistics, or the consequences those actions might have, or even try to understand the logic of the administration?

My conservative friends have told me for years that sex and marijuana use amongst young people went up because Clinton was immoral and stopped fighting the drug war, but I am wise enough to know there is a lot more to it than that.

Geesh!

"I look at this and see an unwillingness to accept intelligence that does not agree with a previously formulated view of the world..."

'Well, this is normal. EVERYONE does this. The first reaction to any suggestion that one's formulations of the world are incorrect is to resist. It is rare indeed that one substantially change's one's views AT ALL, let alone immediately.'

For those us who work in the natural sciences, we're trained strenuously to develop precisely this skill-- to suspend our natural predilections, expectations, and desires and merely let the evidence speak for itself. It doesn't matter if the results are inconvenient for us or don't fit into an established or accepted model; the empirical facts are the arbiter, and we are duty-bound to accept and report them, and adjust are ideas and models as necessary.

The reason I raise this point is that, as someone who works in the biomedicine field, it is *incredibly* difficult to develop this skill and truly internalize it, at an intuitive level where it impacts our daily actions. It takes years of training, and the metamorphosis involved in becoming a good scientist is as rigorous as that demanded of a good physician. It's a mindset that's just not natural for the human psyche, and I've come to comprehend why it took thousands of years of civilization, of Greek rationalism and medieval Arab empiricism and Renaissance awakening, before scientific endeavors became practical in the 1600s in Europe.

You have to be trained to think in a manner whereby you accept empirical evidence even if it's inconvenient, and revise your prior assumptions as a direct consequence. It's one of the reasons why I have trouble identifying too strongly with either party, b/c in such an identification one loses some of that dispassionate distance which makes one susceptible to outside evidence. Which, I suppose, is another way of saying that the political system unavoidably selects for a group of people who have preconceptions and are extremely resistant to altering them-- whether Democrat or Republican. So it's perhaps unsurprising that the Bush Admin was replete with political types who were less than prone to accept the conclusions of the more dispassionate technocrats in their midst vis-a-vis Iraqi intelligence. The only way to overcome this is to "politicize" the need for such a dispassionate critical distance in such matters, i.e. to deliver a penalty for such screw-ups in the ballot box for any elected official who abuses, manipulates, or willfully misinterprets neutral intelligence. (Old-fashioned Pavlovian behaviorism in the democratic arena.) But that's easier said than done.

That being said, some of the Founding Fathers and their philosophical antecedents in Enlightenment France and Britain were vehement about the indispensability of critical thinking and dispassionate analysis of facts in a leader. The Framers were big on Plato's Philosopher King archetype and they wanted to see it in their Enlightenment experiment of a new country (the USA). The Framers looked to Isaac Newton (scientist and revered, important member of the English Parliament in its formative stage) as a paragon, and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all possessed some of the philosopher-king aura about them. But I just don't know if there's much chance of such individuals taking the reins these days. The tabloidy glare of modern media, if nothing else, tends to discourage such individuals from encountering all the career-wrecking, personal-life-trashing crap of the modern political arena.

http://centristcoalition.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=568

"If you think about it, what we have to do to combat terrorism is to deny it a hiding place. That means convincing the states who have sheltered and supported it that that is dangerous to their own health."

Very true.

"Who should be next? Iran? Too big. Syria? Not that big a threat. Iraq?"

Was Iraq really "sheltering terrorists" during the 1990s following the Gulf War? I question whether there's much evidence for it, in part because the secular Baathists had little enthusiasm for sheltering fundamentalist loons who had the Iraqi leadership in their crosshairs as much as the US. However, Saddam had been making those cash payouts to suicide bombers from the West Bank, and it's possible that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been assisted and given refugee status-- though he'd chiefly been sheltering himself in the northern mountains which were outside Saddam's control. Saddam overall seems to have been a survivalist who, after the whuppings of 1991 and 1993, was still prone to act as a provocateur but hesitant about directly supporting terrorism (which would be an obvious red flag to groups bent on attacking him). It may yet turn out that Saddam provided indirect support to al-Qaeda or related groups, but thus far the evidence seems a bit weak; Iran seems to have been implicated in this to a far greater extent.

"It was already weakened by the first Gulf War. It was continuing to fire missiles at our plane protecting the no-fly zones where Saddam had already used nerve gas on the Kurds."

An abhorrent action no doubt, but it occurred during the 1980s when Saddam was regarded as an "our son of a bitch" by the US and, as a political survivalist, feared a northern rebellion far more than an outside intervention. The Congress and White House didn't reprimand him for Halabja, after all, and so he probably figured he could get away with it; he had no illusions about that after 1991. He was still negligent, corrupt, and capriciously cruel to enemies as always, but the sort of mass slaughter of Halabja was a nonstarter after the Gulf War. If only it had inspired such castigation when it first occurred.

"He was playing games with the U.N. inspectors and repeatedly violating the ceasefire agreement he had signed."

A fair point. Saddam's mischief-making was draining away a lot of resources and entangling the US and the UN in the volatile politics of the Persian Gulf far more than they might have liked. Even though the UN inspectors reported that any WMD's Iraq may have possessed were destroyed after 1998, they candidly recognized a pattern of defiant and unproductive behavior on his part.

"Iraq occupies a strategic position in the area where these groups began."

Yes.

"Establishing democracy may prove overly ambitious, but the success of the strategy has shown up in Libya's abandonment of its WMD program."

This gets cited a lot and I'm still not convinced there's a cause-and-effect relationship here. Muammar Qaddafi had already been warming to the inspectors and the US during the 1990s, in large part because of the devastating effect of the economic sanctions and a desire to win markets for his country's oil. He had been making many overtures well before Iraq was a glint in George W. Bush's eye.

I'd be more convinced that Qaddafi got rid of his WMD's if Saddam had been caught red-handed with WMD's of his own, then forcibly disarmed by the invasion. This would demonstrate a clear cause and effect: "Saddam possessed and was still developing large quantities of WMD's. We cut through all the red tape and made him pay dearly for it, evicting him from power forcibly. We'll do the same to you if you develop WMD's." But the problem is that Saddam didn't possess the WMD's, and if anything the head rogues of the rogue states might derive the opposite lesson: "Saddam in Iraq lacked WMD's and was clobbered, Kim Jong-Il in North Korea did possess WMD's and has been treated with relative kid gloves. Ergo, I better get my little uranium-238 science project in gear, while building up a nice stash of anthrax and VX nerve gas in the basement. Maybe that’ll deter the U.S."

I'll acknowledge that, perhaps, the willingness of the Bush Administration to act offensively in a military action, even in the face of world disapproval, may have deprived Qaddafi of any misconceptions that the US would hesitate to act against him in the face of a perceived threat. That is, the Iraq invasion may have indicated that he might be a target of a preemptive action. But I'm still not sure if Iraq was the right proving grounds for such a preemptive move; maybe, e.g., a fundamentalist-controlled Pakistani regime that saw nothing wrong with selling a few of its nukes to moneyed terrorists. But Iraq seemed like an odd choice for Exhibit A.

"Pakistan is helping us in hunting terrorists."

True, but they were doing this after the war against the Taliban and al-Qaida, well before Iraq.

"And we don't know anything about what our Special Forces are doing, but I have little doubt that they are proceeding apace."

Agreed.

"Critical members of the U.N. Security Council were bought off by Saddam and the U.N. itself was corrupted by his manipulation of the "Oil for Food" to allow him to continue to bribe politicians and journalists and to continue to build palaces while his people were denied the benefits of the program."

Indeed, and in this respect Saddam (who, by virtue of his negligence, was precipitating great suffering for his people) was connected, if indirectly, to 9/11; it was bitterness over those sanctions which served as one of al-Qaeda's chief recruiting pitches.

"Having seen the mass graves and the torture chambers his regime maintained, I can't understand why people are so convinced that Iraq wasn't a valid target."

Saddam was a thug and the world's better off without him in power, but an invasion of a country carries a lot of cost-benefit baggage no matter what. There are scarce resources available for overseas military adventures and a lot of awful despots in power in many places (our allies in Saudi Arabia have a pretty repressive regime of their own). Although Saddam certainly gave ample reason to the rest of the world to wish for his removal.

“Would Kerry send troops into the tribal areas of Pakistan to root out bin Laden? Would the U.N. approve doing so?”

Actually, this I think would have far less trouble garnering world approval, since bin Laden and al-Qaeda *are* perceived as a genuine threat and are regarded as a clear and present danger. One of the main objections of those questioning the Iraq war was that they did not cast Saddam and Iraq in the same terms; they did not consider him a threat. Although, I do appreciate the gist of your point; the UN system can be extremely unwieldy when decisive action is demanded, particularly when the intelligence merits it. That’s why it’s essential to have more reliable intel on such a consequential decision as this.

I do think that Saddam had a connection with 9/11 and al-Qaeda, and a pivotal one at that, though the link was indirect and did not constitute direct support. That is, Saddam’s actions were directly inflaming the conditions that led to the rise of al-Qaeda in the 1990s. It was Saddam’s menace and the Saudi kingdom’s queasiness about him that led to the stationing of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, a garrison right in the backyard of the holy sites itself that was sure to get the Islamists frothing at a perceived military occupation. It was also Saddam’s negligence of his own people that caused the sanctions to have such a devastating effect on Iraq’s children, an issue that had a powerful emotional resonance in Arab media and aided al-Qaida recruitment. Saddam was also exacerbating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with his subsidies to suicide bombers’ families.

I was skeptical and often frankly opposed to the Iraq war when it was conducted, but for better or worse now we’re in there and we do have an opportunity, at least for some sort of limited democracy that could serve as an example, if not an ideal one. But my optimism on democracy there is tempered by Iraq’s history—the place was created by British officials after World War I *precisely so that it would be divided against itself*, as a divide-and-conquer ploy to assist acquisition of Iraqi oil. This failed disastrously for the British and they were kicked out, but even today we’re still left with the results of their mapmakers’ decisions, faced with a country housing three mutually hostile ethnic groups in a pitched struggle for control of the land’s oil resources.

Such a place is naturally an incubator for strongmen like Saddam, and sometimes I wonder if it’s capable of accommodating a representative democracy when so many ethnic groups might so easily perceive a disenfranchisement. I think the federalism in the interim constitution is astute and shows some promise, but it’s an open question whether it’s borne out. At the very least, we have to make it absolutely clear that we did not invade the country for oil (i.e., not seal up exclusive sweetheart contracts for US companies), and that the occupation has a clock—i.e., absolutely no permanent military bases in Iraq. We’re having enough trouble winning popular approval for the bases in allies like Germany and South Korea, and it doesn’t make sense to further stoke regional ire by maintaining them right in the Arab heartland.

I just saw Clarke on the NewsHour, and read some book quotes of his in a local paper. I think what we see here is a basic difference in policy vision between Clarke and the Bush Administration, tempered by the fact that Clarke and the Bush Admin didn't get along. His grumble about Bush was that he was always looking for the simple, bumper-sticker view. That's what a democratic leader does, and his former boss Clinton did the same thing.

Clarke's description of Bush as Iraq-obsessed after 9/11 is definitely disturbing. Fortunately, he seems to have overcome that at least long enough to put Afghanistan first, and to have put his ducks in a row before going after Saddam.

My sympathies come down on the Bush side, maybe mostly because Clarke feels that terrorism is stronger now. He points out that there are more attacks, which is true but I think misses something.

Al'Qaida is desperately afraid of this democracy stuff (see 'Zarqawi's alleged memo, consistent with Al'Qaida action). Unlike before when each group was expected to be self-financing, now they're paying fighters very well by regional standards. And forget about camps, so they're paying untrained fighters lots of money. They clearly feel that if they lose Iraq, they lose. And they're spending the "seed corn," as one govt official put it, to fight this war. And they're losing. Each explosion puts Iraqi opinion farther against terrorists. We keep finding senior terrorists and information about them, no doubt put to use in Iraq, the Pakistan offensive and every other front.

Wes sez:
> Such a place is naturally an incubator for strongmen like Saddam, and sometimes I wonder if it?s capable of accommodating a
> representative democracy when so many ethnic groups might so easily perceive a disenfranchisement.

Well, of course we know the United States failed back in 1776 because the North and South couldn't agree atall. And Colombia was ethnically uniform. And Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan are all complete ethnic and cultural monoliths.

Bush gets plenty of credit in my book for taking out the Taliban's al Qaeda sanctuary. I'd like to think that John Kerry would have done likewise, but I'm not sure. Kerry supported the operation, but that does not guarantee that he would have initiated it had he been President.

But it does appear that the Bushies have had an unhealthy obsession with Iraq, which has distorted their decision-making. I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt and supported the Iraq invasion, but I feel a bit like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy to hold the ball for a field goal. The ball (WMD's) are not there.

I still hope the Iraq situation works out. But if I were an investor, I'd say that the Afghan invasion was a gold mine, and the Iraq invasion was a dog.

Here's another referee: Bill O'Reilly

I find his discussion on Clarke

http://www.billoreilly.com/pg/jsp/general/genericpage.jsp?pageID=112#20040323-001

truly "fair and balanced." He's certainly not buying the Administration's spin. He wants to get to the bottom of it, let the chips fall where they may.

> Such a place [Iraq as forged by the British in 1920] is naturally an incubator for strongmen like Saddam, and sometimes I wonder if it?s capable of accommodating a
> representative democracy when so many ethnic groups might so easily perceive a disenfranchisement.

"Well, of course we know the United States failed back in 1776 because the North and South couldn't agree atall."

????? Whatever conflicts may have been incipient between North and South United States in 1776 (do you mean 1861 here?), this has nothing do with the ethnic clashes that have riven Iraq. Iraq is a country filled with a century of bitter ethnic conflict, in large part sown deliberately by the colonial power that drew its lines on the map.

The split between North and South in the USA had nothing to do with ethnic differences, but ensued from a disagreement over political principles (legality of slavery and states' rights). There were descendants of English, Irish, Scots, Germans, Jews, Dutch, French, et al. settlers on both sides of the Civil War; what separated them was not ethnicity but political beliefs. And that political discord actually did in fact tear the country asunder in 1861.

Iraq's multiethnicity per se is not what makes a functioning democracy difficult; it's the *history* of ethnic conflict among the different groups, their relative geographical segregation, and their already-manifest competition for resources (as in Kirkuk). It's too pessimistic to claim that this is insoluble, but it raises the bar for success much higher than in, say, Germany or Japan where this factor was not present after WWII.

"And Colombia was ethnically uniform."

????? What does this have to do with anything?

"And Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan are all complete ethnic and cultural monoliths."

????? What, exactly, is the point being advanced here?? Yes, these countries (Germany, Austria, and Japan at least) are ethnically homogeneous, but when these nations are cited in the context of Iraq it's generally done to *contrast* their situations with that of Iraq. The democratization of Japan and Germany post-WWII (which were already modernized, relatively prosperous societies that had suffered the hiccup of authoritarianism in the interwar period) was greatly assisted by the relative lack of ethnic conflict in those nations, which would have complicated matters greatly. Iraq, by contrast, is beset by longstanding suspicions and bitter resentments among its Sunni Arab, Shiite Arab, and Kurdish (not to mention Assyrian Christian and Turkmen) ethnic constituencies. Kirkuk in particular exemplifies the bile already bubbling to the surface.

As I said, this isn't necessarily a recipe for deep-sixing democracy in the country, but it does compel some sobering analyses and hard-nosed realism about what's needed to maintain an intact nation with a representative government within the current borders. It's not going to be easy to keep that country together.