News n Notes from the Web

New glimpses of Bush worldview
By Peter Grier and Faye Bowers, Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
April 1, 2004 Edition

WASHINGTON - An extraordinary fortnight of revelations about US preparedness before Sept. 11 has provided at least this preliminary picture: When the Bush foreign policy team took office in 2000, it was determined to focus on big nations and traditional power geopolitics, not Al Qaeda and the new terrorist threat.

The Clinton people? Sure, they'd made terrorism a priority. But top Bush officials were dismissive of their predecessors' performance, and determined to avoid what they felt were Clintonesque mistakes. It's not unusual for a new administration to want a sharp change in direction. Given the problems topping the news at the time - chaos in Russia, Chinese belligerence - a return to a more realist foreign policy appeared to make sense.

But it's also not unusual for a new administration to find that the world looks far different from inside the White House Situation Room than from the campaign trail. Adapting to circumstances takes time - and Al Qaeda was determined that time was one thing the US would not have. Seen in that context, the attacks of Sept. 11 hit the nation at a vulnerable seam in its history, when new political leaders were still adjusting to Islamist terrorism's dangers. "It's a very hard thing, changing governments," says Francis Bator, professor emeritus of political economy and history at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

This does not mean that the allegations by former antiterrorism chief Richard Clarke of lack of interest in terrorism among Bush officials are true. Some aspects of Mr. Clarke's accounts have been challenged by people he worked with.

But the central notion that Mr. Bush did not make terrorism as high a priority as hindsight shows it should have been is one that he himself has admitted. Mr. Bush said as much in an interview with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for his book on the response to Sept. 11. Furthermore, many of the most important foreign-policy appointees to the new Bush administration were old-school geopoliticians. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had held the same job under Richard Nixon, at the height of the cold war. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice's academic background is in Soviet studies.

Their belief was that power matters in international affairs, and that power resides in big states. In January 2000, Ms. Rice published an article on national interests in the journal Foreign Affairs that contained subsections headed "Dealing With the Powerful," "Russian Weakness," and "Coping with Rogue Regimes." Terrorism is listed as a priority only insofar as it is backed by Iran or other state sponsors. The article, presented as a sort of agenda for the incoming Bush team, rejects the priorities of the previous administration.

The Clinton White House assiduously avoided "a disciplined and consistent foreign policy that separates the important from the trivial," wrote Rice. This may be true - President Clinton's dealings with Haitian unrest, Somalian peacekeeping, and Balkans violence were sometimes criticized as inconsistent even by experts within his own party. Yet it was Clinton, in 1995, who signed a directive authorizing stepped-up efforts to counter loosely affiliated groups of Islamist extremists - a new phenomenon the CIA had recently identified as the most dangerous kind of terrorism threatening the US.

"It's generally the case in all transitions that the incoming administration is critical of the previous administration," says John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. "In this particular case, it was especially sharp." Thus in the first months of the Bush administration US diplomacy changed directions, with new items such as withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the multilateral Kyoto pact on atmospheric emissions moving up the priority list. Bush's first real foreign crisis - recovering a Navy spy plane and crew forced down near China - perhaps confirmed officials' beliefs that big-power politics would be their focus in the months ahead.

But it's probably wrong to portray the Bush team as just a bunch of unreconstructed Cold Warriors. Much of the US national security apparatus remains consistent, president to president, and as Richard Clarke's testimony demonstrates, worry about terrorism was widespread in Washington. The new Bush officials weren't deaf to their fears. Both National Security Adviser Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, told the 9/11 Commission that they realized the Clinton administration had worked very hard on the Al Qaeda problem, according to a commission report. But they'd accomplished little, and their policies, in Hadley's words, were "out of gas." So they determined to produce new ones. They asked counterterror chief Clarke for ideas. On March 7, 2001, Stephen Hadley convened an informal meeting of his counterparts from other agencies, to mull over such options as increasing aid to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. They discussed a new presidential terrorism directive.

"The Bush administration was in the process of developing new approaches ... but it took time," says Robert Pfaltzgraff, an international security expert at Tufts University's Fletcher School. On Sept. 4, 2001, a foreign-policy principals group chaired by Rice "apparently approved" a draft terrorism directive, according to a 9/11 commission report. Among other things, the directive envisioned an expanded covert action program against Al Qaeda. But by then Islamist terrorism had morphed into a greater danger, with more imagination and organizational skills, than top officials of either the Bush or Clinton administration had dreamed. "It's a whole new world that we only began to understand after 9/11," says Mr. Pfaltzgraff.
[Sounds a bit like a conservative reaction to Clarke's polemic, or perhaps just an expected apologia. You decide.]
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Berating Bush About Iraq With Charges Heard Before
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times, 31 March 2004
REVIW OF : AGAINST ALL ENEMIES - Inside America's War on Terror
By Richard A. Clarke, 304 pages. Free Press. $27.

Given the howling political firestorm over Richard A. Clarke's new book, "Against All Enemies," it is surprising how familiar many of his assertions sound, his recitation of pre-9/11 antiterrorism missteps by the Bush and Clinton administrations echoing earlier books and old newspaper and magazine articles. Had it not appeared during the presidential campaign season, had members of the Bush administration not so vociferously attacked its author, had Mr. Clarke not appeared ubiquitously on television as a whistle-blower, the volume might not have become the incendiary best seller that it is.

Many of its most debated charges about the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism have been leveled before. Some have been corroborated or openly acknowledged by other members of the administration. The difference between what Mr. Clarke is saying and what earlier accounts have said seems to be largely a matter of inflection, timing and emphasis.

Mr. Clarke's accusation that before 9/11 the Bush White House did not address the danger of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda with urgency is echoed by the president's own remarks in Bob Woodward's 2002 book, "Bush at War," in which he said he "was not on point" before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11: "I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

Mr. Woodward's book, which drew upon extensive interviews with members of the administration and painted a sympathetic portrait of the president as a commanding leader, also presaged Mr. Clarke's assertions that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz began pushing the case for war against Iraq in the days immediately after 9/11. In Ron Suskind's recent book, "The Price of Loyalty," which also aroused considerable ire in the administration, former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill anticipated Mr. Clarke's recollections that Iraq was in fact on the Bush administration's agenda long before Sept. 11.

As for Mr. Clarke's charges that the Bush administration was preoccupied with matters other than terrorism (like China and missile defense) during its first eight months in office, these, too, have been heard before. In 2002, after revelations about intelligence failures, many newspaper and magazine articles said the same thing.

A Newsweek article that May said: "The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden, among other actions." A Time magazine article that summer, previewing the complaints in Mr. Clarke's book about the slow response to his antiterrorism initiatives, notes that proposals he developed in the winter of 2000-1 "were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush."

The narrative of "Against All Enemies" is very much a story in which Mr. Clarke depicts himself as the prescient gunslinger trying, often in vain, to rally a bunch of dilatory bureaucrats. This can result in some self-dramatizing moments, as when he describes thrusting his "Secret Service-issued .357 sidearm" into his belt as he dressed to go to work at the White House the day after 9/11. But there is also genuine passion in his descriptions of his fights over three decades with a lumbering, risk-averse federal bureaucracy, hobbled with committees and subcommittees charged with coming up with plans for more initiatives and agendas.

One of the things that has opened Mr. Clarke to criticism is his "you are there" narrative, which recreates entire scenes, like the day of Sept. 11 at the White House, complete with dialogue. In addition some of his interpretations of other people's reactions are clearly patronizing and off base: for instance his observation that when he first briefed Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, about Al Qaeda, "her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before" is contradicted by public statements that she made about the terrorist group before joining the Bush White House.

Mr. Clarke — who worked for the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — was known to his colleagues for his hard-driving, take-no-prisoners style, and he describes himself in these pages as an Ahab, obsessively pursuing the white whale of Osama bin Laden.

Of Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Clarke writes that "below that surface calm ran strong, almost extreme beliefs." He describes President Bush as looking for "the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem" and asserts that Mr. Bush felt a need "to `do something big' to respond to the events of Sept. 11," a need filled by going to war against Iraq.

He is scathing about the F.B.I. and its director, Louis J. Freeh, who he says rarely "did anything eagerly that the White House had asked him to do" during the Clinton administration. And he is weirdly contradictory on the subject of the C.I.A. and George J. Tenet, its director, complaining that the agency was laggard in its pursuit Al Qaeda "in sharp contrast" to its director's "personal fixation" on the terrorist group.

Although Mr. Clarke chastises the Clinton administration for failing to follow through on its bombing campaign of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, which might have eliminated Osama bin Laden and curtailed Al Qaeda, he suggests that it was more committed to the fight against terrorism than its successor.

He praises Bill Clinton for having "greatly increased funding for counterterrorism" and initiating "homeland protection programs" but sees him as hobbled by his lack of a military record and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, liabilities that limited his power to pursue an aggressive bombing campaign in Afghanistan, fire a "recalcitrant F.B.I. director who had failed to fix the bureau" or "direct the military to engage in antiterrorist commando operations they did not want to conduct."

At the end of this book Mr. Clarke argues that the war against Iraq has undermined the war against Al Qaeda and spawned further hatred of the United States in the Islamic world. He also argues that the Bush administration should have been paying more attention to four other volatile countries in the region: Afghanistan (where the Taliban is now resurgent), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

If the United States does not grapple with the problems in these countries, he warns, "we face the prospect of the following scenario by 2007: a Taliban-like government in Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons, supporting a similar satellite nation next door in Afghanistan and promoting Al Qaeda-like ideology and terror throughout the world; in the gulf, a nuclear-armed Iran, promoting its own version of Hezbollah-style ideology; and Saudi Arabia after the fall of the House of Saud, creating its own version of a 14th-century theocratic republic."

This vision, a reverse image of the democratic domino theory envisioned by some proponents of the Iraq war, may sound like a far-fetched nightmare. But then Mr. Clarke's pre-9/11 warning of "a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead" once seemed like a far-fetched nightmare, too.

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