Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Dick Clarke: channeler of Alexander Haig, as chronicled here New York Post Online Edition: postopinion
I missed Richard Clarke's interview on 60 Minutes yesterday. I watched his interview with Charlie Rose on his (Rose's) PBS show tonight. Here are the key points that I took away:
1) He believes that if the Bush Administration had heeded his advice, the FBI may have apprehended 2 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, possibly disrupting the plot--perhaps causing one of the four teams to abort.
2) The Bush Administration used too few troops in Afghanistan to cut off and capture bin Laden.
3) George Tenent of the CIA may privately agree with him, but probably won't say so until after he leaves government service.
4) He won't serve in a Kerry Administration, should we be cursed with same.
5) Had the Bush Administration followed his advice...had it not gone to war with Iraq (I'm not totally clear that he advised anyone on totally avoiding war with Iraq)...our security situation would be much better.
6) No one in the Bush Administration lied, but they came close to doing so.

My take on his assertions:
1) Pre-9/11, the Bush Administration was still operating under the Clinton Administration's dictum that the FBI and the CIA could not cooperate at the operational level to share information that could be used in domestic counterintelligence. Clarke says that Clinton officials had held high level meetings to "shake the tree" to get such information out that Clarke claims thwarted terrorist attacks going back to 1996. At least, that's the impression that he gave--that Clinton's NSC Director, Sandy Berger, was ignoring or countermanding Reno's order so that better inter-agency coordination could take place. He apparently feels that Condi Rice, Bush's NSC Director, should have listened to him and done the same. The Bush Administration says that the chatter that the intelligence services picked up in the first 8 months of 2001 indicated that attacks would come against US or allied interests overseas, not domestically. I don't know what other arguments he used in classified meetings with Administration officials, but it sounds like they were alert to a threat. Clarke doesn't deal with the issue of the FBI bureaucracy's poor handling of a low-level agent's reports on the terrorists' activities. Apparently, no chatter alerted anyone to activities involving aircraft, and still fewer "experts" would have believed that the goal of the terrorists was to crash the planes instead of holding the passengers as hostages. He seems to be on shaky ground.
2) I expect that Secretary Rumsfeld will comment on the Afghanistan strategy at some point. I believe--based on my reading of history--that the Bush Administration was mindful of the failure of the Soviet Union to conquer the country, despite deploying over 100,000 troops and planting one of the largest minefields in history. Fifteen thousand Soviet troops died during the 10-year conflict. The USSR withdrew in 1989 after reaching a face-saving agreement with the US that called for the ending of US support for the Mujahidin. Afghanistan suffered huge losses during the conflict: almost one million Afghanis died; five million more were forced to leave their homes.
The US Special Ops/Air Force approach destroyed the Taliban and resulted in destroying or capturing 2/3 of the Al Qaeda leadership. Whether we would have suffered unacceptable losses in a more massive buildup--a buildup that would have taken much more time to transport and stage prior to invasion--is a question that Clarke wasn't asked. We cannot know whether more troops would have meant immediate capture of bin Laden given the terrain and weather conditions during the period of the war. Again, Clarke doth protest too much.
3) If Tenent turns on the President, he'll betray a man who stood by him when many in Congress and around the country were (and are) looking for a head to chop off. The "failure" of pre-Iraq war intelligence arguments pointed to Tenent and his daily briefings of the President as a scapegoat for the "failure".
4) Good.
5) That's not clear. Clarke says that Dean was right, that we're no safer after the fall of Saddam. I disagree.
-- Saddam was corrupting the UN, and allied governments, to get sanctions lifted.
-- Saddam gave speeches (see the MEMRI site) praising his scientists for their research on nuclear weapons and other WMD programs. It appears that if he didn't have WMD programs, he had WMD experts in place ready to resume the programs once the sanctions were lifted.
-- Saddam hosted terrorist camps, and paid the families of Palestinian homicide bombers after their deaths in attacks on Israel.
-- Saddam was in a position to destabilize the supply of a crucial national resource used by the entire world--something he had done once before. He could damage the economies of the industrial world, and hold them hostage if he became powerful enough to stand against the West.
6) Don't think so. President Bush is a man who says what he means, and means what he says. I think that's true of the Vice President as well. No senior official would last long in this Administration if caught in a lie.

Richard Perle will appear on the Charlie Rose show tomorrow night to rebut Clarke's assertions. It should be a good one.