Business Week: Blame Bush for What Came After 9/11

Blame Bush for What Came After 9/11
Thu Apr 15, 8:18 AM ET

A funny thing happened on my late-night cab ride uptown a couple of weeks ago in New York City. 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 about 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 (news - web sites), 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.

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