The
accusations were, and are, serious, since they go to the heart of
the Bush campaign as a "war President" with steady sure leadership
on the war on terror - as a President that can be counted on - as
a President that can be trusted. The accusations further pierce
the veil of secrecy that has dominated the Bush war policy. We
must kill the messenger.
Assessing Bush's performance in dealing with terrorism, Clarke
tells Sixty Minutes: "Frankly, I find it outrageous that
the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's
done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored
terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to
stop 9/11. We'll never know...I think he's done a terrible job on
the war against terrorism."
The
Bush attack team went to work quickly, making 15 news appearances
on Monday alone. The coordinated Bush assault promptly labeled the
Clarke revelations as "Dick Clarke's American grandstand,"
questioning the financial motives of Clarke, the early release
date of the book, his political motives and alleged ties to the
Kerry campaign Foreign Affairs advisor, his character, his loyalty
to the President and his patriotism. His timing for the release of
his whistle blower bombshell, of all things, before his testimony
before the 9/11 Commission during a Presidential Campaign. Cheney argued that Clarke "wasn't in the loop" on major decisions
and may hold a personal grudge against Rice.
Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill and Bob Woodward
were all inside the Bush administration in various capacities
after 9/11 and during the build up to the war on Iraq. All, in one
way or the other support the argument that Bush was determined to
go to war on Iraq regardless of the evidence of an Iraq-9/11 link.
Clarke was interview on Sixty Minutes this past Sunday.
During the interview Clarke said, "Rumsfeld was saying that we
needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke went on, "And we all said ... no, no.
al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And
Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And
there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are
lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do
with it."
According to Newsweek, "Clarke portrays the Bush White
House as indifferent to the al-Qaeda threat before 9/11, then
obsessed with punishing Iraq, regardless of what the evidence showed
about Saddam's al- Qaeda ties, or lack of them."
According to Clarke, he was called into the White House Situation
Room (Roger Cressy was present) by Bush on September 12th, and was
in effect asked to find a link between Iraq and 9/11. He informed
the President that Iraq had not been involved in any terrorism
against the US in eight years. Bush has no recollection of the
meeting and Bush representatives initially disputed that it ever
occurred.
Six days later he submitted a report to that affect. It was
apparently rejected with a notation "update." The Bush
administration dismisses the accusation that the President pressed
for an Iraq-9/11 link as the President's duty to investigate all
potentials.
Woodward provides even
more support for the Bush focus on Iraq and the potential for the
Bush administration to shape or disregard evidence in order to.
According to Woodward, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were
of the opinion that Iraq should be included in the first round of
the war. As early as Sept. 12 Rumsfeld argued that the United States
should take advantage of the terrorist attacks to go after Iraq's
Saddam Hussein immediately.
Woodward's last
interview with Bush took place at the president's Crawford ranch on
Aug. 20, 2002. He told Woodward that the story he was writing, the
buildup and eventual successful execution of the campaign in
Afghanistan, should serve as a blueprint for the president's
thinking and strategy for Iraq. But the conclusion was clear,
Woodward
"He wanted Saddam out."
As soon as the
Pentagon's Afghanistan war ended in January 2002, Bush turned to
Iraq. The plan to go into Iraq was
instituted by Bush before ever going to the US Congress or the
United Nations. According to the Guardian, "On February 16,
2002, Bush signed a secret national security council directive
establishing the goals and objectives for going to war with Iraq,
according to classified documents I obtained," Mr. Scarborough
wrote, in an account of the "global war on terrorism" as seen from
the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary.
Did Bush Come Into Office with a Plan to Go
Into Iraq?
Richard Clarke was interviewed by the Guardian after the Sixty
Minutes Interview. Shortly after Bush took office, according to
Clarke was, "The buzz in national security staff administration
wanted to go after Iraq."
When asked, do you think [the Bush administration] came into
office with that [invading Iraq] as a plan? Clarke responded, "If
you look at the so-called Vulcans group [Bush's pre-election foreign
policy advisors] talked about publicly in seminars in Washington.
They clearly wanted to go after Iraq and they clearly wanted to do
this reshaping of the middle east and they used the tragedy of 9/11
as an excuse to test their theories."
When asked, do you think President Bush was already on board when
he came to office, Clarke went on, "I think he was. He got his
international education from the Vulcans group the previous year.
They were people like Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz.
They were all espousing this stuff. So he probably had been
persuaded. He certainly wasn't hearing any contrary view during this
education process."
What Clarke said about
Iraq was bolstered by O'Neill. O'Neill told Sixty Minutes,
"From the very first instance, it was [Bush's obsession] about
Iraq... It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone
of it. The President was saying, 'Go, find me a way to do it.'"
According a recent
Reuters report, Richard Rosecrance, a political scientist at the
University of California, Los Angeles put it this way, "Each of
these revelations adds to the others so that the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts and the message gets reinforced with
voters." Attacking the credibility is so many insiders, including
Republicans, makes clear to any reasonable person that where there
is smoke there is fire.