Mark Steyn: Bush has nothing to fear from this hilarious work of fiction

In January 2002, the Enron story broke and the media turned their attention to the critical question: how can we pin this on Bush? As I wrote in this space that weekend: "Short answer: You can't."

So Enron retreated to the business pages, and, after a while, the media and the Democrats came up with an even better wheeze: how can we pin September 11 on Bush? Same answer: you can't. But that doesn't stop them every month or so from taking a wild ride on defective vehicles for their crazy scheme.

The latest is a mid-level bureaucrat called Richard Clarke, and by the time you read this his 15 minutes should be just about up. Mr Clarke was Bill Clinton's terrorism guy for eight years and George W Bush's for a somewhat briefer period, and he has now written a book called If Only They'd Listened to Me - whoops, sorry, that should be Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror - What Really Happened (Because They Didn't Listen to Me).

Having served both the 42nd and 43rd Presidents, Clarke was supposed to be the most authoritative proponent to advance the Democrats' agreed timeline of the last decade - to whit, from January 1993 to January 2001, Bill Clinton focused like a laser on crafting a brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, but, alas, just as he had dotted every "i", crossed every "t" and sent the intern to the photocopier, his eight years was up, so Bill gave it to the new guy as he was showing him the Oval Office - "That carpet under the desk could use replacing. Oh, and here's my brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, which you guys really need to implement right away."

The details of the brilliant plan need not concern us, which is just as well, as there aren't any. But the broader point, as The New York Times noted, is that "there was at least no question about the Clinton administration's commitment to combat terrorism".

Yessir, for eight years the Clinton administration was relentless in its commitment: no sooner did al-Qa'eda bomb the World Trade Center first time round, or blow up an American embassy, or a barracks, or a warship, or turn an entire nation into a terrorist training camp, than the Clinton team would redouble their determination to sit down and talk through the options for a couple more years. Then Bush took over and suddenly the superbly successful fight against terror all went to hell.

Richard Clarke was supposed to be the expert who could make this argument with a straight face. And, indeed, his week started well. The media were very taken by this passage from his book, in which he alerts Mr Bush's incoming National Security Adviser to the terrorist threat: "As I briefed Rice on al-Qa'eda, her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard of the term before, so I added, 'Most people think of it as Osama bin Laden's group, but it's much more than that. It's a network of affiliated terrorist organisations with cells in over 50 countries, including the US.' "

Mr Clarke would seem to be channelling Leslie Nielsen's deadpan doctor in Airplane!: "Stewardess, we need to get this passenger to a hospital."

As it turns out, Clarke's ability to read "facial expressions" is not as reliable as one might wish in a "counter-terrorism expert". In October the previous year, Dr Rice gave an interview to WJR Radio in Detroit in which she discoursed authoritatively on al-Qa'eda and bin Laden - and without ever having met Richard Clarke!

I don't know how good Clarke was at counter-terrorism, but as a media performer he is a total dummy. He seemed to think that he could claim the lucrative star role of Lead Bush Basher without anybody noticing the huge paper trail of statements he has left contradicting the argument in his book.

The reality is that there is a Richard Clarke for everyone. If you are like me and reckon there was an Islamist angle to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, then Clarke's your guy: he supports the theory that al-Qa'eda operatives in the Philippines "taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building".

On the other hand, if you're one of those Michael Moore-type conspirazoids who wants to know why Bush let his cronies in the House of Saud and the bin Laden family sneak out of America on September 11, then Clarke's also your guy: he is the official who gave the go-ahead for the bigshot Saudis with the embarrassing surnames to be hustled out of the country before they could be questioned.

Does this mean Clarke is Enron - an equal-opportunity scandal whose explicitly political aspects are too ambiguous to offer crude party advantage? Not quite. Although his book sets out to praise Clinton and bury Bush, he can't quite pull it off. Except for his suggestion to send in a team of "ninjas" to take out Osama, Clinton had virtually no interest in the subject.

In October 2000, Clarke and Special Forces Colonel Mike Sheehan leave the White House after a meeting to discuss al-Qa'eda's attack on the USS Cole: "'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded. 'Who the s*** do they think attacked the Cole, f****** Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Does al-Qa'eda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?'"

Apparently so. The attack, on the Cole, which killed 17 US sailors, was deemed by Clinton's Defence Secretary Bill Cohen as "not sufficiently provocative" to warrant a response. You'll have to do better than that, Osama! So he did. And now the same people who claim Bush had no right to be "pre-emptive" about Iraq insist he should have been about September 11.

As for Clarke's beef with Bush, that's simple. For eight years, he had pottered away on the terrorism brief undisturbed. The new President took it away from him and adopted the strategy outlined by Condoleezza Rice in that Detroit radio interview, months before the self-regarding Mr Clarke claims he brought her up to speed on who bin Laden was: "We really need a stronger policy of holding the states accountable that support him," Dr Rice told WJR. "Terrorists who are just operating out there without basis and without state support are a lot less dangerous than ones that find safe haven, as bin Laden does sometimes in places like Afghanistan or Sudan."

Just so. In the 1990s when al-Qa'eda blew up American targets abroad, the FBI would fly in and work it as a "crime scene" - like a liquor-store hold-up in Cleveland. It doesn't address the problem. Sure, there are millions of disaffected young Muslim men, but, if they get the urge to blow up infidels, they need training and organisation. Somehow all those British Taliban knew that if you wanted a quick course in jihad studies Afghanistan was the place to go. Bush got it right: go to where the terrorists are, overthrow their sponsoring regimes, destroy their camps, kill their leaders.

Instead, all the Islamists who went to Afghanistan in the 1990s graduated from Camp Osama and were dispersed throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, where they lurk to this day. That's the Clarke-Clinton legacy. And, if it were mine, I wouldn't be going around boasting about it.

>>>But the question of intrigue is would the approach to protecting against terrorism been any different up to and until the event of Sept. 11, 2001 with another President in place? My opinion is I doubt it would have changed drastically..... I think it took the event to shake the changes that are being implemented.<<<

I wish to disagree slightly with this assessment. I think the seminal event that told al Q'aeda that they could get away with hitting the US hard and not being attacked back was the Blackhawk Down embarrassment in Mogadishu. Now, if Bush were President, two things would have been true:

1)The soldiers would have gotten more back up.
2)Even if such an embarrassment occured, we would not have pulled out of Somalia with our tails between our legs.

The feeling amongst Bin Laden and others was that the US was soft and could be hit hard. They wouldn't respond in a way that would end the terror networks for good. That perception of our country would have been different had we fought harder in Somalia after the Mogadishu incident. I think George H.W. Bush would have been more aggressive in this manner than Clinton was which could have changed the whole atmosphere in the world of the terrorists.

Like you write, though, it is just speculation.

That perception of our country would have been different had we fought harder in Somalia after the Mogadishu incident. I think George H.W. Bush would have been more aggressive in this manner than Clinton was which could have changed the whole atmosphere in the world of the terrorists.

Good point.

As for Clarke's beef with Bush, that's simple. For eight years, he had pottered away on the terrorism brief undisturbed. The new President took it away from him

IIRC, he was screeching about an imminent "electronic Pearl Harbor" while still assigned to counter-terror. His reassignment to electronic doomsaying seemed at the time like something he had wanted all along.

But he was lousy at that too. He had no credibility then, and even less now.

>>>On the other hand, if you're one of those Michael Moore-type conspirazoids who wants to know why Bush let his cronies in the House of Saud and the bin Laden family sneak out of America on September 11, then Clarke's also your guy: he is the official who gave the go-ahead for the bigshot Saudis with the embarrassing surnames to be hustled out of the country before they could be questioned.
<<<<

OK, Here is a question. I haven't heard about this. Was it Clarke who gave the go ahead for the Bin Laden family members to leave via aircraft after 9/11? I have heard that he was the one who OK'd the bombing of the Aspirin factory in the Sudan in 1998.

I think it is rather amazing that this piece of excrement is going to make so much money from the fruits of his failures. His failures which have and continue to make our country more vulnerable to attacks from terrorists. What a jerk!

Can someone point me to a source on the above quote from Steyn?

Bush has nothing to fear from this hilarious work of fiction...

&&&&&&&

I only wish that this were true, but the Democrats' Minsistry of Propaganda, aka CNNCBSNBCABC, are all over this like Jesse Jackson on money, and for the uninformed voters this junk is going to stick in their minds. Remember how they portrayed Dan Quayle as dumb?

Terrorism is an issue Bush can still win on, because the facts are behind him. Bush did the right thing, after 8 years of Clinton letting the problem fester. Since 9/11 was 2 years in the planning and the people were in place in 2000 planning this, it is absurd to pin this on Bush. It's total 20/20 hindsight to imaging Bush of all people could or should have stopped this in his 8 months in office, while the people who were there the 8 YEARS prior had no similar responsibility.

Clarke was a miserable failure in the Clinton admin at stopping terrorism and his complaints are baseless at best.
Steyn disproves at least one of Clarke's inane suggestions, that Rice hadnt even heard of Bin Laden, etc. Sure, the Democrats can keep hammering at Bush - but if they are in the wrong, sooner or later it will backfire, even with the media bias that is so pervasive against Bush.

This portends significant electoral problems - for the Democrats. As in 2002, focussing the election on national security helps the Republicans. This may be why Bush's polling has actually improved in the last week while this scuffle went on: As long as the topic is terrorism, peope remember that Bush *DID WHAT IT TOOK AFTER 9/11 TO FIGHT TERRORISM*.

Then the nerve it touched was a wrong one.

Frist was right. Clarke was wrong.

He had no right to apologize to anyone for anything.

Who are you, anyway?

"Then the nerve it touched was a wrong one. Frist was right. Clarke was wrong. He had no right to apologize to anyone for anything.

Who are you, anyway?"

If it really matters to you, please go back and reread that post and the following, I was making a comment on the *political* situation, not passing judgment on the appropriateness of Clarke's comments. What you or I think about the appropriateness of Clarke's statement is irrelevant to my point there: that Clarke's apology clearly "touched a nerve" with many listeners, and that First's comments therefor appeared *politically* "tone deaf" to me.

Myself, I think that to the extent that 9/11 was any American's fault it was a result of longstanding failures at both the intelligence and political level, and that in retrospect a lot of people in the intelligence community and in *both* the Clinton and Bush administrations likely wish they could revisit their decisions with the benefit of hindsight.

And that in a political culture like this one, where it's suicide to admit mistakes, such testimony is going to be political fodder for both sides.

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