Clinton's Clarke Defense Doesn't Hold Water
By California Yankee Posted in Democrats — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
In his meltdown after being asked by Chris Wallace if he had done enough to get Osama bin Laden, President Clinton implored us, time, and time, and time, and time again, that if we think he didn't do enough to get bin Laden, all we have to do is read Richard Clarke's book - Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.
Is placing his fate in the hands of Richard Clarke the best defense that this former leader of the free world can come up with? As soon as the Former president invoked the name of Clarke my antennae went up.
I started scratching the old memory pool. I remembered Charles Krauthammer's 2004 "Sept. 11, Lies and 'Mistakes.'"
Krauthammer took Clarke to task for laying blame for the 9/11 attacks on the Bush administration:
Read more.
The 1990s were al Qaeda's springtime: Blissfully unmolested in Afghanistan, it trained, indoctrinated, armed and, most fatally, planned. For the United States, this was a catastrophic lapse, and in a March 2002 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists, sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt [them] down country by country."
What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened."
It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest?
[. . .]
The "Frontline" interviewer asked Clarke whether failing to blow up the camps and take out the Afghan sanctuary was a "pretty basic mistake."
Clarke's answer is unbelievable: "Well, I'm not prepared to call it a mistake. It was a judgment made by people who had to take into account a lot of other issues. . . . There was the Middle East peace process going on. There was the war in Yugoslavia going on. People above my rank had to judge what could be done in the counterterrorism world at a time when they were also pursuing other national goals."
This is significant for two reasons. First, if the Clarke of 2002 was telling the truth, then the Clarke of this week -- the one who told the Sept. 11 commission under oath that "fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly [there was] no higher priority" -- is a liar.
Second, he becomes not just a perjurer but a partisan perjurer. He savages Bush for not having made al Qaeda his top national security priority, but he refuses even to call a "mistake" Clinton's staggering dereliction in putting Yasser Arafat and Yugoslavia(!) above fighting al Qaeda.
Byron York, National Review’s White House correspondent, takes Clinton's Clarke defense apart piece by piece.
York writes that when Clinton met resistence in getting the forces at his command to go after bin Laden, Clinton gave up. York uses four citations to Clarke's book to demolish Clinton's Clarke defense.
The former president also raised the wagging of the dog in his defense. Wag the dog is a reference to the theory, conspiracy if you like, that the cruise missile attacks Clinton ordered after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were unnecessary and only meant to distract from the president's Lewinski troubles. Clinton tried to use it as an excuse, imoplying that had he done more he would be accuse of wagging the dog.
ABC's Jake Tapper counters this, reminding us that most lawmakers from both parties were quick to rally behind Clinton. Tapper points out that Senators Ashcroft, Coats, and Specter did raise wag the dog, but the "mainstream" media did a lot more to raise the wag the dog theory, than did the GOP leadership apparatus.
President Clinton also used his Republican secretary of defense, William Cohen, as a shield against the perceived criticism. Krauthammer in his "Sept. 11, Lies and 'Mistakes'" article contains a passage which explains why invoking Cohen in his defense was also a mistake on Clinton's part:
As Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen testified, three times the CIA was ready with plans to assassinate Osama bin Laden. Every time, Clinton stood them down, because "we're not quite sure."
When I first saw the teaser footage Fox released showing the former president becoming unhinged, I thought this must have been a prepared temper tantrum designed to gain some political advantage. After watching the whole interview I believe Clinton just snapped, he seemed truly out of control. If you haven't seen the interview, you should watch it so you can form your own opinion about the former president's tirade. The You Tube video can be watched below and the FoxNews transcript is available here.
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But still the moonbats seem to see Bill as speaking truth to power when he wasn't speaking truth and it wasn't to power.
Why the weaseling? Why the defensiveness?
"If I was still President, we'd have 20,000 troops in Afghanistan..."
No, if you were still President we'd be in a civil war over your usurpation of power. If you had one tenth the class in your whole body that George H. W. Bush has in his earwax, you would go find a hole somewhere and crawl your weasellanimous self into it.
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Evil men hide from the truth, but good men stand upon it.
Clinton was basking in the glow of some excellent work on fundraising and awareness. He was feeling good. But this Bin Laden/legacy control thing was obviously under his skin -- eating away at him.
Clinton seems to have have been very sincerely and deeply worried about Bin Laden. The bottom line is that he just wasn't worried enough to bet his approval rating on it.
That will be his legacy.
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"It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." - Chief Justice John Roberts
"Clinton seems to have have been very sincerely and deeply worried about Bin Laden. The bottom line is that he just wasn't worried enough to bet his approval rating on it."
Brent Money
-- Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it rocks absolutely, too. --
Clinton says himself, "I tried and failed but at least I tried." He also says, "I left Bush a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the Best man, who was demoted, for the job." I'm just wondering; If Clinton had such a comprehensive anti-terror plan, and the best guy to do the job, then why did he (Clinton) fail?
Here is a article that gets shunted aside, a time when Clarke thought he was off the record and explains the Bush timeline to Jim Angle of FNC ...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,115085,00.html
It talks about the attack plan that Bush had in the works prior to 9/11 when the time ran out. Clearly shows that Bush was on a course to take action against al Qaida and the Taliban.
If someone could tell us HOW we would have taken out the terrorist camps in Afghanistan.
Easy enough to play Monday Morning QB but at least explain how we were going to do so with any meaningful impact? Lots of cruise missles? Massive airstrike from carriers in the Indian Ocean through Pakistani airspace traveling nearly 1000 miles in each direction? Assuming we ignore the logistical impossibility of those choices how much impact would they really have on the terrorist camps? And when the Taliban show pictures of dead children that were killed while in "school", what then?
Let's remember that neither Pakistan, which was covertly funding the Taliban, nor any other Afghan neighbor were too keen on providing us any logistical support prior to 9/11.
There is indeed something worse than doing nothing. It's doing something that achieves nothing for you but helps your enemies.
I'm also a bit perplexed at your dismissing the Wag the Dog comment because the media did it more than the Republicans. Not sure why that matters or how that somehow makes his point less accurate.
As for the interview it seemed to me to be a case of expecting a fight and then starting one because you expected it. He clearly overreacted.
"There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were and ask why not." George Bernard Shaw
Glad to see you still come around hawk.
Good points but you obviously agree that they don't justify his fox-news-is-a-right-wing-conspiracy accusation. That is the alternate reality born of paranoia that he is leading his followers into. Its especially ironic when we have to sit and listen to reporters demand that the president and VP answer questions about lying the country into a war for their own personal self-serving reasons, a far more insulting question.
What could have been done? What does Clarke say in the link above?
QUESTION: In your judgment, is it possible to eliminate Al Qaeda without putting troops on the ground?
CLARKE: Uh, yeah, I think it was. I think it was. If we'd had Pakistani, Uzbek and Northern Alliance assistance.
I suppose the theory is that if we had turned Pakistan so they did not view our supporting of the Northern Alliance as a threat, the NA could get the job done. Actually, they did. So it is not so far-fetched.
Regarding Wag the Dog...As I recall, Clinton said repeatedly that the Lewinsky matter was having no effect on his presidency...his ability to do his job. If it was, given the serious problems facing the country at the time, it would have been judicious for him to resign. Many people at the time thought that that was the honorable thing to do. It is hardly fair for him now to use that as an excuse which limited his options. Besides, if the strikes he ordered had not been so bungled, especially the drug factory in Sudan, then Wag the Dog would never have even gotten the weak purchase it did.
Over-reaction seems euphemistic at best. But it seems that some Dem strategists are saying he took the right approach and that others in the party would be wise to follow his lead.
John E.
Dick Clarke was worried about in his famous memo to Condi Rice demanding a BigMeeting, i.e. car bombs, it becomes obvious that Clarke had no more idea of what was going to happen on 9/11 than I did.
When one looks at his record of unmitigated failure in every endeavor save holding BigMeetings (two embassies bombed, the USS Cole attacked, and the Millenium Plot discovered only by sheer luck) how he could be the "best" anti-terror guy is beyond me.
...while showing some leadership in aggressively pursuing bin Laden, he wouldn't have so much to whine about today. The " I was only following the pre-9/11 mindset" excuse only goes so far.
"I'm also a bit perplexed at your dismissing the Wag the Dog comment because the media did it more than the Republicans. Not sure why that matters or how that somehow makes his point less accurate."
He put himself in the Wag the Dog template with his own actions, and I defy you to find any concerted Republican political effort to use it for political purposes. In fact, strong Republican support for his actions probably caused him greater unease than than any Republican opposition.
dreaming about WJC being willing to take a political hit (over anything), let's just imagine him telling the truth for a change. All he would have to do is say, "Look, y'all, remember what life was like before 9/11? Nobody but the counterterrorism types really thought 9/11 could happen. We were all wrong. Blame me if you want -- I torture myself over it already."
But he can't get there, because he's still wagging that finger.
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Evil men hide from the truth, but good men stand upon it.
believed Dick Clarke to be a rebuked genius based on his 9-11 Commottee book tour testimony, and he felt that holding Clarke up was the shorthand way of securing belief.
Dick Clarke admitted that he was wrong not to shut down the training camps in Afghanistan. Heck, if he had done that, we almost certainly would not have had what happened on September 11, 2001. Dick Clark, the "best anti-terror guy," blew it.
And he let the bin Ladens flee the country after 9-11, though I'm not sure how important it would have been to keep them.
I count Dick Clarke as one of those who failed the country prior to September 11 and has harmed the country in the years since. His name should be remembered only in infamy.