Clarke Book Reignites Debate Over Iraq Invasion By Glenn Kessler, Washington Post
John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 commission, put it bluntly to former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke when he testified publicly last week: Why did his earlier, private testimony to the commission not include the harsh criticism leveled at President Bush in his book?
”There’s a very good reason for that,” Clarke replied. ”In the 15 hours of testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president’s invasion of Iraq. And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism.”
The furious charge and countercharge between Clarke and the White House last week has largely obscured this central complaint by Clarke. [mjh: which shows the effectiveness of the White House tactics.] …
Clarke depicts the president as tersely demanding that his staff look for links between the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq. He charges that, for Bush and his advisers, attacking Iraq was ”a rigid belief, received wisdom, a decision already made and one that no fact or event could derail.” In the end, through the Iraq war, ”we delivered to al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable.”
Clarke’s complaint resonates with some other former administration officials. …
Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and Middle East specialist who left Bush’s National Security Council staff a year ago, also agrees.
”Clarke’s critique of administration decision-making and how it did not balance the imperative of finishing the job against al Qaeda versus what they wanted to do in Iraq is absolutely on the money,” Leverett said.
He said that Arabic-speaking Special Forces officers and CIA officers who were doing a good job tracking Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and other al Qaeda leaders were pulled out of Afghanistan in March 2002 to begin preparing for the war against Iraq. ”We took the people out who could have caught them,” he said. ”But even if we get bin Laden or Zawahiri now, it is two years too late. Al Qaeda is a very different organization now. It has had time to adapt. The administration should have finished this job.” …
Clarke also caused a stir last week by saying that Bush, in his secret directive ordering the strike against Afghanistan six days after Sept. 11, also told the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq. The Washington Post had reported on this directive more than a year ago, generating no complaint from the administration.
”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,” Clarke told CBS. …
”Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, ‘America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.’ This is part of his propaganda,” Clarke said. ”So what did we do after 9/11? We invade … and occupy an oil-rich Arab country which was doing nothing to threaten us.
”The result of that is that al Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al Qaeda, have been greatly strengthened,” he added.