On the ins and outs of counterterrorism policy, or the national security and intelligence bureaucracy more generally. Dan Drezner is much closer to being such an expert. When I walked into his office and said, “So what should we think about Clarke?” he replied that he was writing his blog post at that very moment.
So, does Clarke have a personal incentive to stick it to this administration? Absolutely. Does he know what he’s talking about? Absolutely. Can what he says can be ignored? Absolutely not.
There’s much more.
I have to say that the administration’s responses are making Clarke look more and more credible all the time. See lots from Josh Marshall, and this roundup from Ryan Lizza. Particularly damaging is Dick Cheney arguing that Clarke doesn’t know what he’s talking about because the Bush administration moved him off al-Qaeda duty and onto cyberterrorism– which did take place, but a month after 9/11.
Everything Clarke says about the White House in the months before and days immediately after 9/11 can be true without substantially impugning either the post-9/11 counterterrorism policy or the war in Iraq. What his account does necessarily impugn is the judgment and decision-making abilities of the administration principals. In particular, it bears out the charge Matt Yglesias has been making since before the Clarke story debuted: that the administration’s security principals were so state-centric in their focus that it impaired their ability to understand the magnitude of the al-Qaeda threat. (See here, here, here, and here.)
It’s not as though I knew what Matt charges Rice and Rumsfeld didn’t know in 2000-01– that non-state terrorists were a or the central threat to American national security. But it seems like Clarke did know that, and tried to communicate it– and it seems he met an excess of resistance from officials who were state-centric in general and Iraq-centric in particular.
As Dan also points out,
It’s worth remembering that every new administration needs about six months to work out the foreign policy kinks — flash back to the Clinton team’s firxt six months if you think this is a recent problem. To claim that they were slow to move on Al Qaeda misses the point — unless it was a campaign issue, every new administration is slow to move on every policy dimension.
Furthermore, as the Washington Post reports, in the end the administration did get this one right, in the form of a September 10, 2001 deputies meeting that agreed upon a three-part, three-year strategy to eject Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. For all of Clarke’s accusations about the Bush team’s neglect, it’s hard to see how things would have changed if this decision had been made a few months earlier. Post-9/11, for all of Clarke’s claims about intimidation to show Iraq caused 9/11, the policy outcome was that we ejected the Taliban from Afghanistan. Iraq was put on the back burner. I’m someone who’s been less than thrilled with Bush’s management of foreign policy. Some of what Clarke says disturbs me, particularly about homeland security. But for this case, it does look like the system worked.
The best thing for this administration is to say in response to Clarke would be: “Yes, if we could turn back time, we’d have given AQ more consideration. But it probably would not have prevented 9/11. And don’t claim that we could solve a problem in eight months that the last team — in which Clarke was the lead on this policy front — couldn’t solve over eight years.”
Clarke’s account doesn’t affect the underlying argument for going into Iraq; it doesn’t affect the evaluation of the Afghan campaign; and it might not mean that anything was left undone pre-9/11 that one could have known should have been done. But it does affect how we should view the judgment, the competence, and the trustworthiness of the administration pursuing those policies.
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