March 25, 2004

Put a Fork in Richard Clarke. A writer at TIME takes a stab. No, I don't think Clarke is credible. What he's said about Rice and Bush patently isn't credible. Here's my take on what is going on. Thousands died on Clarke's watch, and he's understably uncomfortable with letting the full blame fall at his own feet (via Clinton). I mean, he's the one who warned everybody, right? Well, he knew the threat -- and year after year after year he worked for a President who utterly failed to respond to that threat. And Clarke says himself that he would spin to protect the top guys -- which means he cared more for his own employment than for the truth or the safety of the country. It's hard not to get the feeling that there is something wrong with this man -- and I think what we are seeing is the public meltdown of a man suffering an unbearable case of what the professors call "cognitive dissonance". It's predictable human nature, but it isn't pretty and it isn't admirable.

UPDATE: Don't miss today's CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER. Quotable: "The 1990s were al Qaeda's springtime: Blissfully unmolested in Afghanistan, it trained, indoctrinated, armed and, most fatally, planned. For the United States, this was a catastrophic lapse, and in a March 2002 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists, sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt [them] down country by country." What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened." It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest? ...

Clarke is clearly an angry man, angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable. He told the commission to disregard what he said in his 2002 briefing because he was, in effect, spinning. "I've done it for several presidents," he said. He's still at it, spinning now for himself".

UPDATE: Dean Esmay makes an important point:

Most disturbing to me in all this is something too few people have noted. Clarke seems like a fairly typical career civil servant who is neither appointed nor elected. Such people tend to become fairly narrow-minded, inflating the importance of their own role, and also resentful of the "big vision" folks--i.e. the elected and appointed officials who have to tie together broad policy positions involving far more than one civil servant's specialty. This is pretty normal, but now, all future administrations are going to have to worry that the career civil servants whose job is to give them information and advice will try to make them look stupid ..

If our governing officials can no longer trust the people who work for them, this is not a good thing. Because we're not talking about blowing the whistle on criminal activity here: we're talking about policy debates, and a career civil servant deciding he doesn't like the strategies formulated by the people he works for--and being treated like a hero by partisans who just don't happen to like the people in office right now.

Very unhealthy, very dangerous in the long run.

Yes, very. Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack