Soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks on
the United States, President George W Bush created a
litmus test for his presidency along the following line:
that he should be judged as a "war president" in the
global "war on terrorism". He reminded the nation of
that template on February 8, in an hour-long interview
on NBC's program "Meet the Press", by referring to
himself as a "war president" 31 times. Now his former
chief counter-terrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, in a
forthcoming book, Against All Enemies, not only
gives Bush a failing grade on his performance in that
"war", but, in a widely publicized interview on CBS's
program, "60 Minutes", on Sunday accuses him of
neglecting to recognize the threat stemming from
al-Qaeda after entering office. The most serious aspect
of Clarke's accusation against the president is of
"manipulating America into war with Iraq with dangerous
consequences".
When it entered into office in
January 2001, said Clarke, the entire focus of Bush's
national security team was on working on old issues,
such as Iraq, Star Wars, and "not on new issues, the new
threats that developed over the preceding eight years".
Clarke told CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl that Bush
officials were "tepid" in their response, when, before
September 11, he suggested to hold a meeting to discuss
threats stemming from al-Qaeda. "Frankly," he added, "I
find it outrageous that the president is running for
reelection on the grounds that he's done such great
things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored
terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done
something to stop 9/11 ..." Clarke observed. However, he
added: "There is a lot of blame to go around, and I
probably deserve some blame."
Immediately after
the September 11 attacks, the focus of Bush's national
security team, instead of remaining focused on attacking
Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, quickly turned on Iraq.
Starting the first National Security Council (NSC)
meeting, top Bush officials wanted to punish Iraq.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was saying,
according to Clarke, that the US needed to bomb Iraq.
Even when other participants of that meeting kept
insisting that the focus should be on al-Qaeda and
Afghanistan, Rumsfeld was saying there there were not
any good targets in Afghanistan, and that there were
many good targets in Iraq. Clarke said at first he that
thought Rumsfeld's comment about the lack of good
targets in Afghanistan was a joke. The administration
wanted to believe, he told "60 Minutes", that there was
a connection between September 11 and Iraq.
The
most damning part of Clarke's accusation is a reported
conversation that he had with the president, in which
Bush said: "I want to find out whether Iraq did this."
He goes on to clarify that Bush never asked him to make
it up; however, he notes: "... the entire conversation
left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted
me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this."
When Clarke responded that US intelligence had
investigated that issue and found no connection, Bush
"came back at me and said, 'Iraq, Saddam', find out if
there's a connection". Bush's tone, according to Clarke,
was "very intimidating".
The White House reacted
quickly to Clarke's charges. Late on Sunday, it offered
a number of rebuttals, saying that Bush specifically
told National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that he
was "tired of swatting flies" and wanted to go on the
offense against al-Qaeda.
In a statement, the
White House said that officials met frequently between
March and September 2001 to devise ways to deprive
al-Qaeda of the support of Pakistan and the shelter
provided by the Taliban. The statement said that the
anti-al-Qaeda strategy was ready for implementation on
September 4, 2001. Since 16 of the 19 airliner hijackers
were already in the country by June 2001, even
neutralizing al-Qaeda leader bin Laden would not have
halted their plans, the statement said.
Clarke,
the White House said, did not advocate any plan to take
on al-Qaeda inside the US and never made the Bush
administration aware of security assessments made by the
Bill Clinton administration about the possible use of
airplanes as weapons.
Clarke, meanwhile, on the
CBS program, continuing to describe a series of
developments following the meeting with Bush described
above, states that the US intelligence team wrote a
report and sent it to the NSC reiterating the lack of
connection between September 11 and the regime of Saddam
Hussein. It bounced back from there saying: "Wrong
answer ... do it again." Without implicating Bush in
this particular insistence from the NSC, Clarke added:
"I don't think the people around the president show him
memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he
doesn't - wouldn't - like the answer."
Citing
other evidence of how the top national security
officials of the Bush administration had their minds
made up from the very beginning about attacking Iraq,
Clarke recalls a meeting with Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz. When Clarke told him the US
government needed to deal with al-Qaeda, Wolfowitz said:
"No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al-Qaeda. Why
are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk
about Iraqi terrorism against the United States."
Clarke's accusations are not entirely new.
Former US Treasury secretary Paul O'Neil has made
similar charges in Ron Suskind's book, The Price of
Loyalty, that Bush and his top advisers made up
their minds about toppling Saddam in the immediate
aftermath of the September 11 attacks, without paying
heed to any evidence linking the two. Similarly, former
United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, while
promoting his own book, Disarming Iraq, is making
rounds in the US and the United Kingdom, arguing that
both the US and the UK were not interested in finding
out whether there were indeed weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq prior to their invasion of that
country.
Whether or not this controversy will go
away, or whether it will bring about regime change in
the US depends on what happens inside Iraq between now
and November 4 of this year when presidential elections
take place. In the meantime, the credibility of Bush and
the US appear to be eroding on a sustained basis.
Clarke's latest accusations promise to provide the
critics of Bush with further firepower.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria,
Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.
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