Gyroscope

A newsletter for those unmoved by spin.
No. 34, March 29, 2004

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I've only read a portion of Richard Clarke's pivotal book, Against All Enemies, but it will be another step in the slow collapse of the Bush administration. Clarke makes several key points. First, he argues that prior to 9/11, the Bush administration was too focused on state-sponsored terror to consider al Qaeda as likely to do any significant harm to the U.S. Actually, I have some sympathy for this error, it was one many made, and, absent my having access to classified material, it might have been a mistake I'd have made.

But Clarke calls attention to something that has been largely ignored: the warnings issued by the CIA to top policy makers in the summer of 2001 that something big was up with al Qaeda. For weeks, America's national security apparatus was on full alert, and our European allies did arrest some suspects. Just before September, the effort petered out for lack of attention from the top, for Rice, Bush and Rumsfield never got behind this effort.

Clarke compares this unfavorably to a similar situation during the Clinton administration where top officials did get involved and terror attacks were stopped before they occurred. When you put this together with the evidence that the earlier Congressional committed found (((() this increases the concern that the 9/11 plot could have been stopped or blunted with information already in the hands of the government.

But it is after 9/11 where Clarke makes his most telling points. He describes how on the very day after 9/11 administration officials were almost demanding that he and the CIA say that Iraq was involved and how no intelligence organization could agree to that. The notion now that Bush was 'misled' about WMD or Iraqi involvement, that we 'relied on bad intelligence' is a crock. The driving force behind the Iraq invasion was Bush and company running amok over the evidence everyone was giving them.

This leads to the charge he makes in his appearances but which people give less time to: that the invasion of Iraq was at best a distraction from the war on terror and at worst an actual defeat that created more terrorists then it killed.

The response to Clarke is the most telling proof of his accuracy. Since his book came out he has been accused of committing perjury by a US Senator, who admitted a day later that he had no knowledge of any perjury. His motives have been attacked by people who are trying to spin everything for a reelection campaign. He's been told he is profiting off the blood of 9/11 by a team that has already tried to use the images for fund raising. I've made the rounds of the webblogs and one can see wild claims that Clarke has 'admitted his lies,' is incompetent because he claimed cyber terrorism was important and that he was out of the loop or maybe just jealous at not getting a job.

What is missing from all of this is any significant dispute about the facts or the interpretation of the facts he has put forward. And how could there be? Most of what Clarke says has been said before. Even a US Army publication claims the Iraq invasion was a distraction. Half the governments of Europe also make the charge. Most of Bush's top advisors have written policy articles arguing for the very things that Clarke accuses them of believing.

It wasn't always so. Conservatives used to have ideas. Even goofy ideas like supply-side economics were at least testable and subject to experiment and debate. Prior to that, ideas of personal decency, states rights, limited government, strict construction of the U.S. constitution, might be ones to argue over, but they were at least a position with something behind it.

What does the Bush administration stand for? What great idea motivates them? Three ideas come to mind: that wealthy people should keep all their money, that America should acquire an empire, and that Bush should stay in power. Those three ideas explain about 90% of the Bush administration.