Centerfield

Not Blowing Over

So much for the pundits who dismissed Richard Clarke's charges as a one-week story. In week two, he's the cover story of Newsweek. It's not entirely complimentary, but it supports one of his key assertions

A senior administration official showed NEWSWEEK a copy of Clarke's PowerPoint briefing delivered to Rice and her new team in January 2001. It offered proposals to "deter, defeat, and respond vigorously" to Al Qaeda. Rice instructed Clarke to come up with ideas to "eliminate" Al Qaeda, said this official. The command came from Bush, who was now getting briefed every morning by the director of the CIA, George Tenet. At a meeting attended by Rice and Tenet in May, Bush declared, "I'm tired of swatting at flies. I want a strategy. I want to go on the offense."

It took months for the deputies (the No. 2 officials at State, Defense, etc.) to grind away at a new plan, and when it was finally presented to the principals—Sept. 4, 2001, a week before the 9/11 attacks—it looked pretty much like Clarke's old plan. White House officials protest that the new plan was more thoroughgoing; that it called, for instance, for a new strategy to transform Pakistan from protector of Al Qaeda to a platform for attacking the terrorists in their lairs in Afghanistan. But everyone agrees that the plan would have taken three to five years to accomplish.

It's hard to grasp the notion that the Bush Administration may actually have been weaker on terror than Clinton. After all, they are the hawks, arent't they? What Clarke has been saying, and we're getting evidence to back it up, is that while the Administration certainly intends to be tougher than Clinton, they shifted the focus to rogue states, and de-emphasized non-governmental organizations like Al Qaeda.

Posted by rickheller at March 29, 2004 07:30 PM