Nine-hundred and twenty-six days removed from the most horrificday in the history of our country, we are still at pains to figureout exactly what happened on that Tuesday morning in September.
A congressional commission is investigating the causes of 9/11and whether the attacks could have been prevented. Whatever thecommission finds, the reasons 9/11 happened boil down to two simplefacts.
One, we were faced with an enemy who hates us more than theylove life and declared war on all who do not believe as theydo.
Two, we failed to take them seriously.
No one can go back and change either of those facts. Of course,there are always those who will second-guess, claiming if we justdid this one thing, everything would have been fine.
Currently, that man goes by the name of Dick Clarke. No, not thehost of New Year's Rockin' Eve, but a bitter bureaucrat who servedas a counter-terrorism official from the Reagan administrationuntil he resigned from the government in 2003. Now he has a bookout, conveniently timed to coincide with his testimony in the 9/11commission.
Clarke has appeared on numerous talk shows in the past weekblasting the Bush Administration for not taking terrorism seriouslyenough. He essentially charges that the Clinton Administration dida great job on terrorism, Bush didn't do enough before 9/11, andthe war in Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror.
The first charge is laughable. Al Qaeda carried out multipleattacks on the United States in the '90s, but none were respondedto with any kind of force. If Clinton did a great job on terrorism,then Herbert Hoover did a stellar job on the economy.
The truth is, both the Clinton and Bush Administrations madeplenty of mistakes prior to 9/11.
Clarke says Clinton took the threat more seriously. However,Clarke's past words contradict much of what he says now.
In 2002, Clarke told the press that the Bush Administration madea decision from the beginning not only to continue the ClintonAdministration's policies on al Qaeda, but to "increase CIAresources ... for covert action five-fold" and to change thestrategy "from one of rollback with al Qaeda over the course offive years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called forthe rapid elimination of al Qaeda."
The third charge, that war in Iraq is a distraction from the waron terror, is merely an assertion, though I would say a wrong andnarrow-minded one. If the two have nothing at all to do with eachother, why are terrorists flocking to Iraq? Why would al Qaeda carewho supported the war?
I do not pretend to know who Clarke is or what his motives are.I only know he has contradicted himself on virtually every chargehe is currently making, and the facts do not bear him out. In anycase, he was in a position to do something or voice his criticismsfor a decade.
Teddy Roosevelt said it is the "man in the arena" who is trulycourageous, not the critic. Clarke could have done something whilehe was in the arena. Instead, he wrote a book about how everyonewas wrong but him. I'm sure he'll cry all the way to the bank.
