Blame Bush for What Came After 9/11

The real issue isn\’t why the U.S wasn\’t ready for
the attack, but why the Administration used the
tragedy to invade Iraq

A funny thing happened on my late-night cab ride in
Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. I had been reading
Against All Enemies, the controversial new book by
former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, with its
riveting account of the Bush Administration\’s
extraordinary performance in the hours after the
September 11 attacks. I had watched a somber Clarke on
60 Minutes and saw him grimly but eloquently stand his
ground on Meet the Press.

So as the taxi whizzed past the new Time Warner Center,
it was somewhat surreal to spot Clarke standing on the
corner with another man, laughing heartily. It\’s good
that Richard Clarke can laugh once in a while because he
has taken on the most serious of tasks: Calling to
account a Presidency that failed in its vigilance but
more important — used the death of innocents to lead
the country into a war it had been longing to wage.

TEAR DOWN THE CRITICS. National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice, the Clarke superior whom his book
buries with faint praise, tried to make a cogent case
before the September 11 commission on Apr. 8 that the
newly arrived Bush Administration had done a reasonable
job of pulling guard duty for the republic. All she
really needed to say in her public testimony was: \"We
were new. We were inexperienced. We didn\’t have our eye
on the ball. We\’re sorry.\" But she never did that, and
what she did say was largely irrelevant and already
forgotten.

As irrelevant and discardable, in fact, are the
scurrilous attacks on Clarke by Administration dobermans
such as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.),
whose reputation as a classy politician/physician lies
shattered on the Capitol floor. On Mar. 26, Frist said
he found the Clarke book to be \"an appalling act of
profiteering, trading on his insider access to highly
classified information and capitalizing on the tragedy
that befell this nation on September 11, 2001.\"

The main aim of the Bush disinformation machine seems to
be this: Tear down critics of America\’s preparedness
before the attacks, and, above all, keep the discussions
focused on September 11. Because no matter how much or
how little you believe in the gospel according to
Clarke, most reasonable Americans aren\’t going to blame
the Bushies for failing to foresee and prevent the
slaughter of civilians by a band of suicidal zealots.

NUMBINGLY CLEAR. Even the Aug. 6, 2001, report to the
President entitled \"Bin Laden Determined to Strike in
the U.S.\" will leave many Americans unconvinced that the
Bushies were derelict in their duty. Unlucky, maybe. But
not derelict. Because September 11, 2001, might just as
easily have happened on September 11, 2000, when a
different President had been in office for eight years
— not eight months.

The truly damning part about Against All Enemies,
however, is what Clarke reveals about the
Administration\’s mindset on Iraq. What George Bush, Dick
Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz
really have to answer for is the insidious way in which
they used the Twin Tower horror to coax the country into
supporting an attack on Iraq.

Put Clarke\’s book together with The Price of Loyalty by
former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O\’Neill and The Path
to War, a brilliant piece of reporting in the current
issue of Vanity Fair by Brian Burrough, Evgenia Peretz,
David Rose, and David Wise, and the picture that emerges
is numbingly clear: Bush\’s neoconservative advisers had
Iraq in their sights well before his inauguration.

WHY WAR? Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy
Board Chairman Richard Perle, and a whole procession of
acolytes who worship at the altar of Middle East scholar
Bernard Lewis had all urged regime change in Iraq in
1998. Some even earlier. But why?

Why was this Administration so hell-bent on taking out
Saddam Hussein that it would turn its back on a world
offering sympathy and support after September 11? Why
was it so adamant in its adventurism that it would gild
the threat that Iraq posed to the U.S. — and then put
our troops in harm\’s way — when no clear or present
danger existed? Those questions demand answers.

Clarke cites five rationales for the invasion: Finishing
the job Bush I started, pulling U.S. troops out of Saudi
Arabia (where they were a counterweight to Iraq but
unwelcome), creating a model Arab democracy, opening a
new and friendly oil supply line, and safeguarding
Israel by eliminating a military threat.

\"THE REAL THREAT\"? Philip Zelikow, now the executive
director of the September 11 commission, served on the
National Security Council, was on the Bush transition
team, and was a member of the President\’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2003. According
to the Inter Press Service, he said during a war-on-
terror forum at the University of Virginia Law School on
Sept. 10, 2002: \"I\’ll tell you what the real threat [is]
and actually has been since 1990 — it\’s the threat
against Israel. And this is the threat that dares not
speak its name because...the American government doesn\’t
want to lean too hard on it rhetorically because it\’s
not a popular sell.\"

So to boil all this down, we went to war, sacrificed
thousands of human lives, racked up billions in bills,
and flouted the rules of international law for three
basic reasons: Israel, oil, and the vengeance of a son
whose father didn\’t finish off Saddam and then was
targeted for assassination by the Iraqi Horror Show in
1993? When you think that Bill Clinton was impeached and
almost tossed out of office for fooling around with a
willing intern and then lying about it, his sins seem
like very small potatoes. Very small potatoes indeed.

Ciro Scotti is a senior editor for BusinessWeek in New
York

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2004/nf20040415_0640_db009.htm