Dick

Before Sunday, the name Dick Clark evoked American Bandstand, toupees and that depressing late December night the year you weren't invited to the "cool" party. This week, the media decided Dick Clarke = "Bush lied." As a new week approaches, "Dick Clark" should sue "Dick Clarke"--for loss of reputation.

As everyone knows, Dick Clarke slammed the Administration in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday and testimony today. Clarke, White House counterterrorism coordinator under Clinton and through 2002, just published a "kiss and tell" memoir claiming Bush prevaricated in response to radical Muslims, especially by dropping the fully realized policies developed by the Clinton Administration. Clarke insists that pro-war senior advisors--such as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice Dick President Cheney--repeatedly rejected his findings that Iraq was not responsible for the September 11th attacks. The former staffer concludes "political" interference with his supposedly objective intelligence data allowed Bush to mislead Americans about the need to topple Saddam and liberate Iraq.

Clarke's charges ignited a feeding frenzy among Europeans (hoping Bush's wound is fatal). But the real ruckus comes from Democrats and the media. The former, of course, blame Bush for global terrorism in hopes of putting John Kerry in the White House. In contrast, the latter blame Bush for global terrorism. . ..uh. . .in hopes of putting John Kerry in the White House. Both sorts are, as Jonah Goldberg observed, "so irrational, so hateful and so profoundly dangerous to America that it becomes difficult not to wonder if such people hate George Bush more than they fear terrorists or love America."

Plus they're wrong. Each of Clarke's accusations is belied by the facts or by Clarke himself.

1) Clinton had effective anti-terrorism plans: No. The prior administration had no strategy to defeat Bin Laden (other than law enforcement) . . . as Dick Clarke confirmed in a 2002 interview:

QUESTION: Were all of those issues part of alleged plan that was late December [1998] and the Clinton team decided not to pursue because it was too close to ...

CLARKE: There was never a plan, Andrea. What there was was these two things: One, a description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two years, and which were still on the table. . .

[T]here was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

2) Unlike his treatment by Bush, the Clinton Administration took Clarke's advice. Well, not really--as Clarke conceded this weekend on Frontline:

CLARKE: The interagency group on which I sat and John O'Neill sat--we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved . . .

FRONTLINE: But didn't you push for military action after the [al Qaeda bombing of the USS] Cole?

CLARKE: Yes, that's one of the exceptions.

3) Assuming Clinton had a plan, Bush ignored it. Not true. Instead, the Bush team were the first to oppose Osama--says Dick Clarke:

[I]n January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of years.

And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, in late January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we've now made public to some extent.

And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.

So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.

4) Before September 11th, Rice "never heard" of Al Qaeda: Absurd. During the Clinton years, Al Qaeda terrorists murdered hundreds of Americans in Embassys and on ships. One got life in prison following the failed 1993 WTC bombing. As Ann Coulter observes,

In the year 2000 alone, Lexis-Nexis lists 280 items mentioning al-Qaeda. By the end of 2000, anyone who read the paper had heard of al-Qaeda. It is literally insane to imagine that Condoleezza Rice had not. For Pete's sake, even The New York Times knew about al-Qaeda.

Not even the crazed or the partisan think Rice--author of three books on foreign policy, for six years the Provost of Stanford, an NSC staffer for Bush 41, and with a Ph.D. in international relations--is an idiot. Clarke, implausibly, does. His own testimony suggests Clarke is unreliable and has poor judgment--hardly good qualifications for a senior intelligence officer. Surely Clarke owes Dr. Rice an apology.

5) Days after the attack, the Administration cynically rejected Clarke's evidence that Saddam wasn't responsible for 9/11, saying "wrong answer": Pure spin. The Administration's version--first detailed by current NSC deputy Stephen Hadley on the same 60 Minutes program, and simultaneously by the White House itself--is vastly more plausible:

Dick Clarke did prepare a memo for the President regarding links between Iraq and 9/11. He sent this memo to Dr. Rice on September 18, after the President, based on the advice of his DCI that that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attack, had decided that Iraq would not be a target in our military response for 9/11. Because the President had already made this decision, Steve Hadley returned the memo to Dick Clarke on September 25 asking Clarke to "please update and resubmit," to add any new information that might have appeared. Clarke indicated there was none. So when Clarke sent the memo forward again on September 25, Dr. Rice returned it, not because she did not want the President to read the answer set out in the memo, but because the President had already been provided the answer and had already acted based on it.

A week later, some think support for Bush has dropped. Not surprising since the press only prints partisan spin. But the President's defense is persuasive, and gaining strength. And pundits and politicians now question Clarke's veracity. Once again, Washington's buzzing with the "P" word. P stands for perjury--remember 1998? According to Capitol Hill-insider magazine Roll Call:

House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that former White House anti-terror czar Richard Clarke, the author of a new book critical of President Bush's handling of the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, may have lied in testimony to his committee, and said he plans to explore whether Congressional action on the matter is warranted.

Tellingly, given his long association with, and recent praise for, the Clinton Administration, Clarke dissembles:

"We have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002. Which is true?" asked commission member Jim Thompson.

Both, Clarke answered.

How could both be accurate? Well, Clarke says his former views were "not an untrue case." Apparently, it still depends what "is" is.

But the crisis may be over. Time magazine--historically no fan of the current administration--became a believer. Here's Time's analysis of Clarke's claim that his exculpatory memo was buried for "political" reasons:

On 60 Minutes he said that after submitting to the White House a joint-agency report discounting the possibility of Iraqi complicity in 9/11, the memo "got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer.'" The actual response from Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, shown later in the program, read "Please update and resubmit." On 60 Minutes, Clarke went further, saying that Bush's deputies never showed the President the joint-agency review, because "I don't think he sees memos that he wouldn't like the answer." This is pure, reckless speculation.

Time also rejects Clarke's accusation that Administration officials ignored Al Qaeda before September 11th:

Clarke's televised comments seem designed to disparage the President and his aides at all cost, omitting any of the inconvenient details -- some of which appear in the pages of his book -- that might suggest the White House took al-Qaeda seriously before Sept. 11. Bush, Clarke says, "never thought [al-Qaeda] was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his national security advisor to hold a cabinet-level meeting on the subject." This has been a constant refrain in Clarke's public statements -- that Bush's failure to call a "Principal's Meeting" of his cabinet to discuss terrorism until the week before Sept. 11 showed a lack of interest in al-Qaeda. While it is technically true that the White House did not hold a Cabinet-level meeting on al-Qaeda until Sept. 4, the charge is still misleading, since Bush, as early as April 2001, had instructed Rice to draft a strategy for rolling back al-Qaeda and killing bin Laden, saying he was tired of "swatting flies" -- a line Clarke does include in his book.

The magazine concludes Clarke's just not credible:

While Clarke claims that he is "an independent" not driven by partisan motives, it's hard not to read some passages in his book as anything but shrill broadsides. In his descriptions of Bush aides, he discerns their true ideological beliefs not in their words but in their body language. . .these passages reveal the polemical, partisan mean-spiritedness that lies at the heart of Clarke's book, and to an even greater degree, his television appearances flacking it. That's a shame. . . From now on, the country would be best served if Clarke lets the facts speak for themselves.

Ok, timeout. Take a break and refocus. Clarke is wrong. More importantly, he's irrelevant--Charles Krauthammer calls him "an angry man, angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable." America's got other priorities, as explained in a short yet powerful note by Jeff Jarvis:

The terrorists came within a matter of yards of killing me. But I don't blame the Bush or Clinton administrations for that. I blame the terrorists. . . . But I find the blame game going on now unseemly and divisive and unproductive and distracting and just a little bit tasteless.

I saw people die that day not because of anything we didn't do but because of what a bunch of soulless murderers did do. Let's never forget that. It's us against them, not us against us.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard agreed in Friday's WSJ:

Now is not the time for us to be diverted from this global mission. . . The threat remains. The need for unity in the face of that threat is as important now as it was then [9/11].

Liberals and Spaniards remain convinced (1) we're losing the war on terror; and (2) the war on terror can't be won. More nonsense--just ask ordinary Iraqis, fresh from adopting an astonishingly liberal constitution freeing women, guaranteeing greater individual rights and protection from government tyranny--making the Iraqi people better off than other Arabs (and most of sub-Saharan Africa). They don't think terror's winning: "in a recent opinion poll of Iraqis, 56 percent said things were going better today than a year ago; 71 percent said they thought they would be better off a year from now."

Tremendous progress! But few care. Victor Davis Hanson explains:

The problem is not "getting the message out," but having the intellectual courage to tell the truth and not to be browbeaten by faux intellectuals who talk monotonously of mythical pipelines and Zionist aggression. The fact is, beneath the hype, Iraqis will soon appreciate American help and idealism far more than French perfidy. It is never wrong to be on the side of freedom -- never.

America was founded for freedom. We've repeatedly fought for freedom. In the Civil war, we won freedom for American slaves and for constitutional order. Twice in the 20th century, we didn't cower, but joined distant battles for France's freedom--and in victory, freedom for Western Europe. Through 35 years of a war wrongly called "cold," we sacrificed our own, and spent American treasure, to preserve freedom for Korea, for Eastern Europe and for South East Asia. We persevered long after many liberals and Europeans grew weary--and the Soviet Union collapsed. America's not always been right. But we've tried. And uniquely, America consciously seeks to export freedom, individual rights and democracy to others--as Abraham Lincoln said, "the last best, hope of earth."

Forget Dick Clarke--Dick Clark too. Freedom's the issue, and it's threatened as never before. We've got a war to win. Much of the rest can wait. Focus on victory over terror--that's the side of freedom.

Everyone's welcome on freedom's side. Daily meetings in dining rooms, on doughnut breaks and, if you're in my town, under Dame Freedom herself.