Clarke's Goldilocks strategy

One of the strongest points made against Richard Clarke, IMO, was made by Greg Easterbrook on The New Republic Online.

This brings us to Richard Clarke, man of the hour. Before September 11, he made many general warnings about terrorism, as he should have, but he never specifically cautioned of anything like what actually happened. Clarke spent a lot of time talking about computer-hacking and cyber-attacks, not a lot of time talking about airport screening. That is to say, he had no idea what was coming, either.

Now Clarke depicts himself as the one person who knew it all along. Now he also claims that he knew after September 11 it would be a colossal mistake to pursue Al Qaeda and attack Iraq simultaneously. It's not clear this is correct, but assume it is: Why didn't he say so at the time? If Clarke believed that attacking Iraq was a colossal error, he should have resigned from the National Security Council before the attack began and issued public criticism. Had the president's own chief terrorism adviser resigned and publicly warned against the Iraq attack, this might have had tremendous impact on U.S. policy.

But wait--Clarke did resign before the attack on Iraq! Clarke left government in February 2003, when there was still a chance the Iraq war might not happen. Do you remember the intense international news coverage of the speeches and the "60 Minutes" interviews Clarke gave in early 2003, warning that attacking Iraq would divert attention from the war on Al Qaeda? Of course you don't remember, because it never happened. When he might have changed policy, Clarke kept quiet. Now that he's got a book to sell, he claims he knew it all along.

My sense of Richard Clarke is that while he believes what he is saying, he clearly has an agenda here and is in the service of that agenda above the "truth" or any more noble purpose such as opening a national debate. I think he's a guy who after 30 years as a bureaucrat, making modest pay, found himself at a dead end, Peter-principled out in a Bush Administration that didn't respect his POV as much as the Clintonites. He figured out shrewdly that he could leverage 9/11 to make a nice nest egg for himself.

But what of the substance of his message? In terms of the first main argument, that the pre-9/11 Bush team was less concerned about terrorism than Clinton I believe this may in fact be the case. The Clinton team over 8 years had experienced numerous attacks on US targets and had grappled with millennium issues, the Olympics, the African embassies, the Cole, etc. Bush, on the other hand, came into office with a virtually isolationist sensibility. So while I don’t know, there may be a case to be made on this point. However, Clarke concedes that it wouldn’t have made a difference--even if we had used pre-emption in Afghanistan (imagine what John Kerry would have said!) we wouldn’t have stopped it. In the end, those that wish to judge to Bush team on it’s pre-9/11 anti-terror strategy may do so, but I think it’s far more relevant to gauge their strategy AFTER the wake-up call to all that was 9/11.

On the second point, that Iraq was a distraction, there seems to be a fair amount of rhetoric but zero actual evidence that Iraq has either slowed our pursuit of terrorists elsewhere or has created more terrorists even more determined that they were at 9/11.

Clarke seems to be like Goldilocks--he thought the pre-9/11 Bush strategy was too cold, while the post 9/11 strategy was too hot. Clarke, it appears, preferred the warm strategy that he was so influential in developing in the Clinton administration (and before) of treating terrorism more narrowly--eschewing bolder ideas that the war on terrorism should be a broad campaign focused not just on prior and imminent perpetrators but to regimes that were the most threatening to the US. Clarke has made his case for the Goldilocks strategy and I think he’s right to complain about the Bush team going after his credibility. The Bushies should instead use this as an opportunity to point out that the warm Clinton era strategy wasn’t working, and it is time for a new, bolder approach.