Posted on 03/27/2004 2:14:54 AM PST by Dundee
Kowtowing to terror invites more atrocities
WE live in the age of the great terror, or so our politicians must think. Terrorism and how to combat it is the dominant political issue across the Western world.
Tom Friedman, the liberal foreign affairs columnist in The New York Times, wrote passionately this week, imploring the Spanish Socialists to reverse their decision to pull troops out of Iraq.
Friedman's logic is incontestable. Up to now, every terrorist bombing against the West has hardened resolve to fight the terrorists.
But the Spanish decision to withdraw looks like al-Qa'ida had a victory, convincing a Western electorate to run away because of its fear of terrorism.
Whatever the subtleties of the reasons for the Spanish voting the way they did, "al-Qa'ida deals in the big picture", Friedman says, and the big picture looks like a victory for bombs over solidarity among the democracies.
This can only serve to attract more bombs in the future.
Everything Friedman says about the Spanish Socialists applies with equal force to Mark Latham, except that the Spanish Socialists at least had the same position before and after the bombing. Labor under Latham has weakened its position, apparently in response to the bombing.
In the US, the politics of terror have focused this week on Dick Clarke, the former counter-terrorism chief of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, and briefly under George W. Bush.
In his book, and in testimony to a joint commission on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Clarke makes the central charge that the Bush administration refused to take terrorism seriously before the 9/11 attacks and would not listen to his warnings that al-Qa'ida was about to strike.
The members of the Bush administration who have spoken on these matters deny absolutely the thrust of the Clarke testimony and many of the specific details he recounts.
I first met Clarke two years ago on a brilliant Washington morning, inside the Eisenhower Building in the White House, where he was giving a briefing to a small group of Australians on the dangers of cyber-terrorism.
He struck me then as a passionate advocate of his views and a consummate performer who loved being on the stage.
Reading his book this week, I'm very much inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the Bush administration.
On at least two matters in the book of which I have personal knowledge, Clarke has provided an account which is so tendentious as to be downright misleading.
Paul Wolfowitz is the chief villain in the book, painted by Clarke as so obsessed with Iraq that he downplayed terrorism and demeaned those who tried to get attention for the fight against it.
Clarke says Wolfowitz contrived to push Bob Gelbard out of his position as US ambassador to Indonesia because Gelbard was too tough with the Indonesians on terrorism, specifically al-Qa'ida and Jemaah Islamiah.
This is a story I was all over at the time, and Clarke's presentation of the issue is so weird as to be bizarre. For a start, Gelbard was ambassador in Jakarta from October 1999 to October 2001, a full three-year term.
I spoke to many senior Indonesians, and many senior Australians concerned with Indonesia, at the time. Everyone thought Gelbard a flawed and counter-productive ambassador, whose imperious and arrogant tone towards the Indonesians did much more harm than good.
Gelbard was widely believed to have been instrumental in getting the esteemed liberal civilian, Juwono Sudarsono, sacked as defence minister.
Sudarsono was replaced by the Islamic scholar Mohammad Mafud, who became a great opponent of Gelbard, and spouted bizarre conspiracy theories. In other words, Gelbard made it harder for the then president, Abdurrahman Wahid, to reform the Indonesian army.
No one ever mentioned Gelbard as being too tough on terrorism. More important, by October 2001, the end of Gelbard's term, no one in Western intelligence knew Jemaah Islamiah had become a potent terrorist organisation.
ASIO boss Dennis Richardson has identified this as the central failure of intelligence in Southeast Asia.
In other words, Clarke's sequence and facts are just wildly ropey.
On another matter, Clarke repeatedly says the Bush administration gave the impression Iraq was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet in the months before the invasion of Iraq, I frequently interviewed Wolfowitz, US Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage and other senior US officials. None of them ever suggested such a link, and when asked they all said, on the record and repeatedly, that there was no causal link between Iraq and 9/11.
This unreliable book, one of countless bombs exploded in the age of terror, is more smoke than substance.
In previous posts I've said that Greg Sheridan is close to the Australian Intelligence community. I think this article is their 'unofficial' testimony that Dick Clarke is a liar and a bullsh*t artist.
Um. Yeah, sure.
Make that right down there . . . .
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