Bush’s detractors get a ready audience no matter who they are
Bush can't be attacked from the left, since most American voters are worried about terrorism. So his opponents have to get him from the right.
And they can. Clarke was a political hawk. If in doubt, drop bombs, was how he advised his political masters. So a rebuff from him hits home. Especially if you're George Bush, campaigning on your achievements as a war president.
Clarke's line is simple and ideal for public consumption. Under Clinton, he says, combating terrorism was the top priority. Then the Bush administration took over and lost the plot. When he should have been focusing on al-Qaida, Bush was obsessing about Iraq.
This take on events has gone down well with pro-Democrat media and with the victims of 9/11. They are delighted to have such an eminent champion, a man who served under three presidents. But they should wonder about the reliability of Clarke's story.
His motivation, timing and style are the first grounds for suspicion.
Clarke believes he was demoted by the Bush administration. His book, Against All Enemies, appears in an election year and has netted him $2 million already according to some reports. He stands to make a lot of money in a country obsessed with homeland security.
His testimony to the 9/11 commission was Blair-like in its eloquence and empathy: "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness."
Such wonderful soundbites rarely fall unaided from the mouths of counter-terrorism officials. They are triumphs of the spin doctor's art. They also pander to the victim culture by suggesting there is a highly-placed villain who can be blamed for their misfortune.
True, the system failed the people of 9/11. Had the FBI received certain information from the CIA, they could have picked up the terrorists. But like all panderers to victimology, Clarke is refusing to acknowledge the huge debt owed to hindsight, which makes all things clear.
Bush was sufficiently honest or foolish to say he "didn't feel a sense of urgency" about al-Qaida before 9/11. His National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said she "didn't think anybody could have predicted that those people could have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center."
Both these lines have been seized on to suggest that they weren't on top of their brief. But the truth is that Bush went further than Clinton by taking daily briefings from the CIA from the beginning of his presidency. And Rice was responding to a specific allegation that Bush had been warned of a September 11-type attack some five weeks before it happened.
Unquestionably, Clarke was more vigilant than any of them. He was the hard man in counter-terrorism and in a post 9/11 scenario he can portray himself as a Winston Churchill figure, the prescient hero who everybody ignored until it was too late. Since the 1990s, Clarke was telling his masters that a new breed of global terrorist, exemplified by Osama bin Laden, had developed the ruthlessness and resources to attack America.
What detracts from his credibility now is his eagerness to condemn Bush's first eight months while praising Bill Clinton's eight years. Under Clinton, Clarke was nearly always the odd man out. After the terrorist attack on the USS Cole killed 17 American sailors, he was the only member of Clinton's inner circle urging an attack on al-Qaida. He complained to friends about the Clinton administration's weakness on terrorism and was widely regarded as a source for the 2003 book, Losing Bin Laden, which attacked Clinton's record.
In two important respects, Clarke was closer to Bush than Bill. He announced repeatedly that America's policy included pre-emptive attacks.
"It's not enough to be in a cat-and-mouse game, warning about his plots," he said of Bin Laden. "If we keep that up, we will someday fail."
He also shared Bush's view on weapons of mass destruction. "We should have a very low barrier in terms of acting when there is a threat of weapons of mass destruction being used against American citizens," he told the Washington Post.
Despite the apparent contradictions in Condoleezza Rice's story, it does seem clear that Bush wanted to intensify the fight against terrorism. In one account, Rice tells how Bush wanted more than the "laundry list of ideas" presented by Clarke to contain al-Qaida shortly after the administration took over. In a later interview she says that Clarke "sent us a set of ideas that would perhaps help to roll back al-Qaida over a three- to five-year period; We acted on those ideas very quickly."
WHAT is most damaging to Clarke's credibility is the contradiction between what he has been saying in recent days and what he told reporters in August 2002. Back then, he said Bush decided within weeks of taking office to continue with existing Clinton policy while deciding whether or not to pursue more aggressive ideas that had been rejected by his predecessor. He referred to Bush's decision in the spring of 2001 to increase the CIA's budget for covert action against al-Qaida five-fold. He emphasised that there was no 'appreciable' change in US terror policy from October 1998 until Bush re-evaluated things in Spring 2001. None of this is in the book. Now Clarke says Bill Clinton ran with the anti-terrorism ball but George Bush dropped it.
If, as Clarke says, his 2002 comments were just a spin for his political masters, is he credible now? Are his motives mercenary or personal? Perhaps the key to the affair is his relationship with Condoleezza Rice.
Describing the first time he discussed al-Qaida with Rice, he says, "her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term (al-Qaida) before."
Yet he must have known that Rice had been briefed about the suicide-bomb attack on the American ship, the USS Cole, by Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger. She had also spoken extensively about al-Qaida threat in a 1999 radio interview.
Rice was the reason he did not enjoy the same access to Bush as he had to Clinton. Whereas previously Clarke chaired high-level meetings involving principals in the administration, Rice now had him meeting with deputies. She didn't act with the haste he wanted when he sought a cabinet-level meeting about al-Qaida in late January 2001. She even disciplined him when he failed to show up for meetings.
These grievances seem to have transformed into a very marketable claim that the Bush team failed to act radically against al-Qaida. Clarke's cause has been helped by disquiet over the Iraq war, the self-contradictory nature of the Bush defence, and the controversy over the refusal by Condoleezza Rice to testify to the 9/11 commission.
The problem for Clarke is that his previous statements contradict his claims.
The problem for Bush is that nobody may notice.
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