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Saturday, March 27, 2004

Two things about Richard Clarke

Since I can’t very well link to everything he’s said in the past week (though I’d like to) or reproduce it all here (and I’d like to do that too), and since I’m now six or seven news cycles behind his initial appearance on 60 Minutes (though I did catch him on Charlie Rose on Monday from my hotel in New York), I figure I should boil this down to the simplest and most salient terms.

Thing One.  The question of whether Bush could have prevented 9/11 is a nonce question.  Yes, Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft (and Condi, especially, whose job description apparently has something to do with national security) could have paid better attention to Mr. Clarke between January and August of 2001.  But as the testimony to the 9/11 commission is panning out, it can just as easily be argued by Republicans that Clinton should’ve pursued al-Qaeda more aggressively as well (not that they would’ve supported him at the time, of course).  So the pre-9/11 question, politically, is a push-- and substantively, it involves all manner of what-ifs that don’t get to the real point, which is . . . Iraq.  Clarke’s position on Iraq completely validates everything the serious left has been saying between the fall of the Taliban and the present, namely, that military strikes against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan made sense but that the neocon obsession with Iraq has not only enmeshed the US in an occupation but has fulfilled bin Laden’s every prediction.  Clarke’s account of the pre-9/11 Bush White House is bad, yes.  But the real story lies in Clarke’s account of how the post-9/11 Bush White House treated al-Qaeda as a distraction from Obsession One, invading and occupying Iraq.  (As I said in my American Studies Association plenary address last October:  “for Cheney and Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle, the whole PNAC crew, it was the other way around: for them, after 9/11, Afghanistan was a distraction from the redrawing of the Middle East beginning with Iraq. . . .  For PNAC, al-Qaeda itself was not even so much a pretext as a distraction. Iraq was Item A from the very start, indeed from the founding PNAC memo of 1998, regardless of who was actually responsible for September 11.") Many thanks to Richard Clarke for bearing me out on this.

Thing Two.  Anyone who’s still an ardent Bush supporter-- after Paul O’Neill, after Clarke, after the debacle of “No Child Left Behind” (and this covers Bush’s foreign and domestic policy, all of it) will simply not be persuaded by anything, anything between now and November.  There’s no point even trying.  Even if we were to come up with photos of Bush having (unsafe!) sex with an intern, at this point, it wouldn’t matter:  within two days the talking points would be out, and all the toadies and lackies would be repeating them.  “The intern was a Democrat and a disappointed office-seeker,” Bill Frist would say.  “Democrats have declared themselves to be the party of hypocrisy,” George Will would write.  “When William Jefferson Clinton had his little dalliance with Miss Lewinsky, no one raised an eyebrow, and the GOP leadership stood behind the President in the fight against genocide and terrorism.  But now that Bush has demonstrated that he, too, is human, the far left is calling for his head.” So don’t even bother going to photoshop on this one.  There is nothing you can do.  There is nothing you can say. After Clarke, Bush’s supporters will stand by their man to the last-- even if he’s found guilty of the murder of Vince Foster.

Posted by Michael on 03/27 at 03:49 PM
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