Would the real Richard Clarke please stand up?
There’s something about this guy that bothers me. It’s obvious that he lied about what he did, or what someone else did, but I can’t tell when or where. And this troubles me greatly.
There are two thoughts in the media, and neither one “feels” right. The “mainstream” press (nbc/abc/cbs/cnn) presents Richard Clarke 2004 (C04) as truth, and handwaves the contradictions with Richard Clarke 2002 (C02). The “alternative” press (fox/wnd/watimes) thinks C02 is the truth and C04 is a fabrication.
Neither of these really makes much sense. First off, when you are in a position as visible as his, how much fabrication can you really expect to get away with? Someone’s gonna call you on it sooner or later. Is it possible that all of it is fabrication? What does he gain from it? Are people supposed to flock out to buy his book now? He’s hurting both parties tremendously, because no matter what of C02 or C04 is true, it looks like one long string of failures from 1992 on up. And that’s what bothers me.
If the stories were even CLOSE to similar, I’d be inclined to buy it. But they aren’t. And Clarke’s attempt to say that C02 was something he did because he was asked to “accentuate the positives” is just plain mad. There is no way to spin C04’s “The Clinton Administration gave us a plan and the President ignored it” into C02’s “There was no plan from the Clinton Administration”, so at least ONE of those statements has to be false.
Let’s assume that C02 is correct, and there was no plan given by the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. That means that the Clinton administration didn’t hold terrorism to be the most important thing to deal with (C04 asserts that it was Clinton’s priority), and the actions of the Clinton administration seems to bear this out. Remember, there wasn’t much of a response to Khobar, the Cole, or even WTC ‘93. So it’s easy to believe that C02 is correct.
But there’s enough in C02 that smells fishy that makes me believe that it’s not really true either. We know that the Congressional Democrats were hog-tying the CIA for years. We also know that military action made President Clinton a little squeamish. Yes, Clinton didn’t take bin Laden when offered, even though the excuse was lame. But at the time, official U.S. policy was “Terrorists are criminals”, and what do you do with criminals? You indict them. Even with that, however, I refuse to believe that Clinton intentionally left Al Qaeda alone. He just couldn’t find a clean way to take them down.
And that brings me to some of the C04 testimony that sounds true enough - Clinton couldn’t go into Afghanistan in 1998 because there was no clear way to justify it. It wasn’t politically saleable. I mean, he took crap from people for blowing up a tent! What would the reaction have been if Clarke’s idea to FLATTEN Afghanistan had been acted upon? So that part of C04 is believable.
And now you see why this makes my head hurt.