Demosophia

Mild Mannered Mr. Clarke

I'm just beside myself with anger over the way Richard Clarke has been allowed to get his message out more or less unimpeded. Yesterday on Meet the Press he was all reason and light, observing that "I'm not the issue," and that the Bush administration's attempts to set the record straight were part of a general pattern of character assassination aimed at him. They were "engaged in a campaign to destroy me." (As if he weren't engaged in a campaign to destroy them.) To refute Rice's claim that he had not submitted a comprehensive national plan to combat terrorism (something to which Chris Shays also refers) he suggested that the memo he submitted on Jan. 25, 2000 was virtually identical to the plan that was eventually adopted on September 4. There were no significant differences between the two. Remains to be seen, I guess.

And there was "no inconsistency" between his testimony in 2000, which lauded the Bush administration for increasing the commitment to counter-terrorism over that of the Clinton administration five-fold, and his current claims that the Bush Administration had essentially "done nothing" to quell the terrorist threat prior to 9/11. No harm, no foul. "They (the Bush Administration) don't want to talk about Iraq. They want to punish me (Dick Clarke, intrepid bad-guy fighter guy)." He says, proffering an olive branch dipped in cyanide: "Let's raise the level of discourse. I don't want this to be about personalities." Lord no! He's simply called everyone in the Bush administration lazy, dishonest, and stupid. Can't we all just get along?

To make his case he compares the run-up to 9/11 with the actions taken by Clinton to forestall attacks in L.A. and Seattle on Y2K, allowing that at least Clinton did something. Anyone remember Y2K? My memory may be flagging a bit, but I seem to recall that Jan. 1, 2000 came with a built-in sense of urgency related to the fact that the odometer rolled over from a set of messy 1s and 9s to that pristine 2 followed by three zeros (although strictly speaking the third millennium was still a year distant). Well, the Clintonites may not be able to count, but they sure knew public hysteria when they saw it. And after all 9/11 was a significant date too, wasn't it? The anniversary of the emergency call system, or something? Should've seen that coming months away, right? Well, we all know Bush is dumb but that was really a stunning lapse of digit appreciation!

"No spin, just the facts" folks! Well, no spin now... but Mr. Clarke was just doing his job when he was spinning before, yah know. Hence that magnanimous apology, issued after spreading the "twarn't me" butter so thick you could walk on it. It was just something he "had to get off [his] chest." No attempt to capitalize on 9/11, he told Russert. That's just silly. In fact he has plans to make a "substantial contribution" from the proceeds of his book to those victims of 9/11 that he failed to protect (though it wasn't really his fault, you understand, because he tried as hard as he could to raise the alarm). He'd "like to return to a level of civility," for heaven's sake! Let's discuss this like gentlemen!

So, let's. I think Clarke is making two arguments:

1. That the Bushies were lax on whacking the moles; and

2. That the invasion of Iraq stirred up a hornets nest.

He knows very little about the second contention, because he just has no appreciable expertise in foreign policy, but never mind. Rather than make the case against the invasion of Iraq (which is increasingly difficult given the Zarqawi letter and the actions of Libya and Syria) Clarke chooses to make the case about the first contention. At least he has some credibility in that field, although it's a little like looking for your car keys where the light is the brightest.

On its face, the notion that Bush (or anyone other than Clark Kent's alter ego) could have possibly done enough to whack all the moles is, well, rather preposterous. It's fed by a general proposition that the "gummint" ought to be more or less omnipotent, or at least omniscient, and that any deviation from that standard is due to criminal intent or extraordinary incompetence. That's how we know that "Bush lied" about WMD, after all. We can assume he knew everything about Saddam's true intentions, and simply chose to falsely represent those intentions as an excuse to invade some place that had decent bombing targets. In fact, for awhile, there was actually a myth that the Iraq war was simply the Pentagon's way of testing its glitzy array of weaponry. The Guinea Pig War.

As this leaked Democratic intelligence committee memo demonstrates, even though the hearings are supposed to be about "intelligence" leading up to 9/11, the real intent is to wedge in an apriori set of conclusions about the Iraq War. (Hat tip: Armed Liberal) And, in a rather striking coincidence that's [i]exactly[/i] what Clarke is doing, in his book and public pronouncements. As I said, he just isn't credible on foreign policy, so rather than make the case that Iraq was detrimental to the War on Terror he and the Democrats implausibly argue that Bush did nothing to avoid 9/11. It's an outrageous bait and switch, that cynically employs an enormous national tragedy, not perpetrated by Bush as one might think, but by Al Qaeda. (And did I mention that Clarke voted for Gore in 2000? Ain't that a surprise!)

In other words the wedge that's used to shoehorn in this generic impression that 9/11 was really Bush's fault is some crazy-but-unspoken notion that "the authorities" ought to at least be omniscient. But omniscience is sort of a tough standard to meet, and the majority of Americans might actually question that assumption if it were spoken out loud, so mild mannered Clarke chooses to see himself as a normally omniscient being who just had an inexplicable lapse of some sort. He shoulda known better, but he's awful sorry for dropping the ball. Man, that's LOVE, huh? What a hunk!

But look, that's really an attempt to resurrect the pre-9/11 world where we can all sit meekly in our seats and wait for the authorities to suss things out on our behalf. You can rest assured that if there are any lapses you'll get a sincere apology, together with a crocodile tear or two, and maybe even a compimentary mint on your pillow. But for heaven sake don't shoulder any of that responsibility yourself. Let Dick do it (if they'd only let him).

There have been a few of us mortal folk, like Donald Sensing, Armed Liberal, Andrew Sullivan, and a host of others who have been making the case for a VERY LONG TIME that getting our feet wet in the Arab Middle East, in order to germinate liberal democracy and civil society, is not only absolutely essential to the War [on Totalitarianism 3.x], but it's what the war is really about. What the Copperheads, like Clarke, are appealing to is a certain timidity about the essential nature of the conflict. Make no mistake, what they're saying is that we have no good reason to believe in America. Instead we ought to demure to Europe, where modern democracy originated. Oh, wait...

So let me wrap this up by getting something off my chest, since that's apparently the thing to do. To my mind Clarke and his cadre of Copperhead boosters are pinin' away for their seats on one of those three airliners that hit the WTC and the Pentagon on an insignificant day in September a little under three years ago. They prefer that the rest of us forget that we noticed something on that day that inspired us with a certain moral authority to get the job done whatever it takes, and that doesn't expect Big Shepherd to have it all sussed out for us. Indeed, it just might be that such an expectation is not unrelated to the problem itself.

Posted by Demosophist at March 29, 2004 03:47 PM | TrackBack