3/22/2004
Can you tell the political season is in full swing? Attacks on the President are now coming from nearly every direction , and a great portion of the mainstream media seems to be playing happily along.
In regards to the media attack on the President, Peggy Noonan, syndicated columnists and author, [url=http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110004799]noted recently[/url]:
The media this year are to an unusual degree–even for them–keen to give Mr. Bush a hard time and Mr. Kerry a boost. The daily anti-GOP pounding is taking a toll.
We all know the reasons the press is doing what it’s doing–its biases, its need for a horse race. But this year the press is also taking it on itself to make up for the disparity in war chests. They don’t think Mr. Kerry is going to catch up with the president in terms of money, and they’re trying to even the score.
Now we have former counter-terrorism aid, Richard Clarke, who served for two years under President Clinton and then another two years under President Bush — a fact which most of the media seems to be conveniently ignoring — coming out with a new book which is, of course, [url=http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/US/040322_Clarke_Terrorism_Rice-1.html]highly critical of the Bush Administration[/url] for its stance on terrorism and Iraq. But, as noted in an [url=http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004850]Opinionjournal.com editorial[/url], posted today, Clarke might also be attempting to cover some of his own intelligence failures:
We’d take Mr. Clarke’s words more seriously if, as America’s lead anti-terror official from 1998 through Mr. Bush’s first two years, he had warned someone that al Qaeda might have a strategy to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. He already knew that an Egyptian had flown one plane into the drink and that al Qaeda was interested in flight training. Why didn’t Mr. Clarke connect those dots?
As for Iraq, he and other Bush critics want to claim that the U.S. invasion has only created more terrorists–as if there weren’t any before March 2003. And as if those terrorists are only striking at Americans and our allies in Iraq, not also at Turks, and Indonesians, French and Saudis.
Mr. Clarke lambastes the White House for seeking links between Iraq and 9/11, even as he himself asserts that he knew in the immediate aftermath that there were no such links. How could he have known that? Mr. Clarke fails to mention that Abdul Rahman Yasin, the one conspirator from the 1993 WTC bombing still at large, had fled to Iraq and was harbored by Saddam Hussein for years. In our view, a U.S. President who failed to ask questions about Iraq and other state sponsors of terrorism in the wake of 9/11 would have been irresponsible.
As for the 9/11 commission, the one which the President has been criticized for “trying to dodge,” this too has become a political bat for Democrats eager to swing away at the President. Conveniently, the [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/politics/20PANE.html]NY Times received leaked information[/url] from former Clinton officials scheduled to testify this week before the commission. These officials allege that, in 2000, the new Bush Administration received “urgent” warnings from Clinton officials regarding the threat posed by Al Qaeda.
The problem with this argument is, if this were truly seen as urgent, why didn’t Clinton act more decisively early on, when he had the chance to stop Al Qaeda as it was just gathering strength? Clinton’s policy in regards to terrorism was to treat incidents as “law enforcement” matters rather than military matters.
But we know now that treating terrorist attacks this way is a useless strategy. So, unless Clinton officials at the briefing openly admitted their strategic failure and recommended military action instead, any recommendations they might have made in handling the problem would have been worse than useless.
So, did Clinton officials recommend a military strategy to the Bush Administration? If not, then, by the time Bush took office, it was too late to prevent 9/11.
The fact is, this “law enforcement” strategy against terrorist attacks remained THE practice of the Clinton Administration despite intelligence regarding the growing threat, right up to the end of Clinton’s administration! If the Clinton administration saw al Qaeda as such a momentous threat, there should have been at least a subtle shift in policy… But there never was!
Without the strategy later employed by the Bush Administration, one of linking all military, police, and intelligence services together to assess and pursue the threat, there is no possible way that 9/11 could have been prevented! So, I hope some of the more bipartisan members of the 9/11 commission are willing to ask the hard questions of the previous administration, especially in light of the fact that the military was pushing for action against this menace long before he truly became a threat of global proportions.
Unfortunately for the President, now we have Spain’s new Prime Minister — the first democratic leader ever elected mafia style by terrorists — blaming, in essence, the attacks by terrorists in Madrid on President Bush. Why did the attacks occur? Because Spain supported the removal of Saddam Hussein; meanwhile, those same critics still assert that there is no link between Saddam and terrorism… You figure it out.
And today, Hamas has blamed the death of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas who was killed by an Israeli missile, on the US as well. I wonder, though, if a charge from terrorists of Bush’s culpability in the death of one of the world’s greatest terrorist leaders isn’t a tacit endorsement for the President’s reelection.
At this point, it seems to be a free-for-all against the President by opponents both here and abroad. Not that Democrats and the Kerry Campaign want to be identified with communists and terrorists, much less endorsed by them, but that is the way things seem to be developing.
To me, this is just another example of desperate Dems using their [url=http://www.viewpointjournal.com/comments2.php?id=P38_0_1_0_C]”Scorched-Earth Warfare” brand of politics[/url]. Even Senator Lieberman has [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/22/politics/trail/22TRAIL-CLARKE.html]cautioned his party regarding such rhetoric[/url], yet they rush along seemingly blind to the harm that it does to all of us, and the comfort which it gives to our terrorist enemies.
They want victory at all costs… I wonder if we can possibly survive such a victory?
David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com
4 Comments
wasn’t the clinton administration responsible for reducing the staffing of our international intelligence strength, thereby making the gathering of intel concerning al qaeda more difficult?
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