Found this ifno on Beers, with a reference to his freind, Clarke in a July 2004 of the New Yorker about Kerry: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040726fa_fact
Re-reading the Kerry 'mythology" is a hoot if you've got the time. ;-)
Rand Beers served with the Marines in Vietnam, and he has served as a foreign-policy or national-security officer under every President since Richard Nixon. In August of 2002, the Bush Administration named Beers Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism on the National Security Council, a post he’d held under Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush. This was a version of the job that had previously been held by Beers’s good friend Richard Clarke, who is now famous as the author of “Against All Enemies,” the best-selling exposé of Bush’s Iraq and terrorism policies. Within a few months of his assignment, Beers concluded, as Clarke did also, that the Administration’s focus on Iraq was sapping its attention to the war on terrorism and the demands of homeland security. But his alarm at the resurgence of warlordism in the former Al Qaeda strongholds of Afghanistan was ignored, and on the eve of the invasion of Iraq he resigned from the White House “in opposition to the war” and, he told me, “because I wanted to be part of changing the regime” in Washington. “We were supposed to be facing the most important enemy that we had, Al Qaeda, and we were moving off of that.” Beers soon had a new job, as the top foreign-policy and national-security man on the Kerry campaign.
Beers had admired Kerry’s work in the Senate on the Iran-Contra investigation, on narco-terrorism, and on the restoration of relations with Vietnam. But he was especially encouraged by the speed with which Kerry began to question the Bush Administration’s dedication to fighting Al Qaeda after September 11th. Kerry was among the first public figures, in 2002, to charge that Bush had not matched his action to his rhetoric in pursuing Osama bin Laden but had in fact let him slip away in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, where American commanders hired tribal fighters of dubious allegiance to pursue him instead of sending in our Special Forces. (“After all the chest-thumping, and commitment of America to avenge what happened and to capture Osama bin Laden, we were timid—to say the least—at Tora Bora, and in our response,” Kerry told me.) “We didn’t know then what we know now” about Bush’s eagerness to shift the theatre of war to Iraq, Beers said, but Kerry’s “prescient” recognition that the fight against Al Qaeda was being neglected convinced him that Kerry was the man to back against Bush. As it turned out, Beers said, “Iraq, for better or worse, has become part of the war on terrorism if only because it is an inspiration to Al Qaeda in its recruitment efforts.” But he told me, “At the same time, we’re going to have to figure out how to strengthen the war on terrorism more broadly, which is why we come back to that central point, which is, we have to find a way to bring more of the world into this part of the struggle.”
Beers’s prominent position in the campaign reflects Kerry’s desire not to allow Iraq to define the limits of the foreign-policy debate. In late May and early June, Kerry gave a series of speeches about national security, in which his focus was pointedly on areas that have been eclipsed by Iraq: nuclear proliferation, homeland security, and the expansion and transformation of the military.
Pinz