MORE ON RICHARD CLARKE
From Taranto... Last One for the Day

The Clarke Kerfuffle
Richard Clarke, a former antiterrorism adviser to the White House, has gotten a lot of attention for some bizarre claims about the Bush administration's response to Sept. 11. Clarke appeared on "60 Minutes" last night, and here's the CBS News Web site's account of what he had to say:

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to [Lesley] Stahl. "And we all said . . . no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And [Donald] Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking. . . ."

Perhaps it escaped Clarke's notice, but less than a month after Sept. 11, the U.S. did begin bombing Afghanistan, while the military effort to liberate Iraq didn't get under way until a year and a half later. So just what Clarke is complaining about? Well, we found an October 2003 quote, from a guest on PBS's "NewsHour," that sums it up nicely: "What people are complaining about is that there is contention and debate and analysis and confrontation. I think that's better than trying to sweep everything under the rug." The guest was none other than Richard Clarke.

In a February 2003 article for SecurityFocus.net, George Smith reported that Clarke had a rather unimpressive record when it comes to terrorism:

In 1986, as a State Department bureaucrat with pull, he came up with a plan to battle terrorism and subvert Muammar Qaddafi by having SR-71s produce sonic booms over Libya. This was to be accompanied by rafts washing onto the sands of Tripoli, the aim of which was to create the illusion of a coming attack. When this nonsense was revealed, it created embarrassment for the Reagan administration and was buried.

In 1998, according to the New Republic, Clarke "played a key role in the Clinton administration's misguided retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which targeted bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan." The pharmaceutical factory was, apparently, just a pharmaceutical factory, and we now know how impressed bin Laden was by cruise missiles that miss.

Clarke also "devoted great effort to convincing national movers and shakers that cyberattack was the coming thing," Smith writes. "While ostensibly involved in preparations for bioterrorism and trying to sound alarms about Osama bin Laden, Clarke was most often seen in the news predicting ways in which electronic attacks were going to change everything and rewrite the calculus of conflict."

In an article last week for Time, Clarke offered this brilliant advice: "In addition to placing more cameras on our subway platforms, maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us." Blogger John Hinderaker notes that Clarke is jointly teaching a course at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government with Rand Beers, a foreign-policy adviser to the Kerry campaign. All of which leaves us inclined to take anything this guy says with a grain of salt.