http://www.nwanews.com/adg/story_Editorial.php?storyid=60631No facts, only motives, in Bush World
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, March 31, 2004
If nothing else, Bill Clinton definitely put the right man in charge of fighting al-Qa’ida. Evidently, the Bush administration once thought so, too. On the morning of 9/11, it was Richard Clarke who ran the White House Situation Room while almost everybody else ran for bomb shelters, and Air Force One flew hither and yon until conditions were safe enough for the president to return to Washington. During the most perilous day in recent American history, Clarke and several colleagues—who’d been war-gaming terrorist scenarios, drawing up disaster response protocols and warning a complacent White House that something terrible was about to happen—essentially became the U.S. government. They handled all communications, grounded civilian aircraft, closed the nation’s borders, shut down its ports and notified the nervous Russians that putting the U. S military on its highest state of alert in 30 years didn’t portend a nuclear attack. This is the guy Dick Cheney says was "out of the loop." He ought to know better than to trifle with Clarke. Intense and abrasive, he’s served four presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, and has a reputation as a fierce bureaucratic infighter.
After resigning in frustration, Clarke clearly went to school on the Bush team, somewhat as he once studied Osama bin Laden. Understanding that George W. Bush’s main political asset was his carefully crafted image as a decisive leader in the "war on terror," Clarke watched the administration vilify one critic after another.
Everybody who questioned invading Iraq, a secular, oil-rich Arab police state, instead of fighting al-Qa’ida, a stateless band of religious fanatics, got it in the back: former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. All had their reputations tarnished, their honesty assailed, even their patriotism questioned. There are no facts in Bush World, only motives.
Knowing that his book, "Against All Enemies," would depict a White House that dismissed terrorism as a Clintonera obsession, reacted passively to warnings of an impending al-Qa’ida strike during the summer of 2001, then did precisely as bin Laden wished by attacking Iraq without finishing the job in Afghanistan, Clarke clearly anticipated the administration’s counterattack. Over the past two weeks, he’s singlehandedly made the Bush White House look like chumps, anticipating their every move and outmaneuvering the GOP smear machine. Accustomed to bullying adversaries into silence, the White House has made one tactical blunder after another. The result has been a political disaster.
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