In the comments to ‘Sondheim‘ below, Vesicle Trafficker makes these accusations:

This is a very common argument in Pro-Bush Pro-Iraq war circles. The problem is, it is only partly true. If you substitute “In the decade or so” with “between January and September of 2001”, I think you’d be right.

…

I stand by my statement that it is a Pro-Bush Pro-Iraq war fantasy that the blame for 9/11 falls on Clinton for his alleged effete or ineffective response to global terrorism. 9/11 is not evidence for this, it is only evidence for Bush’s incompetence. It happened on his watch. He didn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. He was worried about stem cells and Saddam.

VT, your evidence for this would be exactly…what?

Because I’ve got a fairly substantial amount of evidence that points the other way.All the pieces were in place for “Operation Wedding Cake’ by July of 01; All Bush had done was increase the covert budget from $2B to $12.5 B in that time. The operational failures that had allowed the low-level operatives to come into the country were the same ones that let the bombers in the WTC I attack in.

Are you really suggesting that there was some strategy that Bush could have executed – one that doesn’t read like a plotline for a Tom Clancy book – that would have, in six months, unwound this plan?

I know a little bit about law enforcement, and have read a fair amount about intelligence. I honestly can’t imagine any policy change that could have interrupted this attack (and I’ll note that given bureaucratic inertia, absent some policy document that you can show that Bush ‘stood down’ the street-level antiterrorist forces, between January and July of 01 they were pretty much doing what they did between July and Dec 00). I’ll leave the door open to you suggest an alternative path that Bush could have followed, and I’ll reserve judgment until we hear what you would suggest.

The planning for the attack began in 1998 or 1999. The CIA plans several attacks against Bin Laden, but is shut down by higher-levels within the Clinton Administration.

Now I’ve proposed a theory back in March (I’m not the only one, and I’m not sure I can take credit for originating it) in which I posit:

And while in fact, the Clinton Administration was somewhat effective in following a ‘legalistic’ arrest and try strategy, it obviously hasn’t worked. I’ve always been annoyed at the righties who claimed that Clinton was snoozing at the switch and that the only U.S. response to terrorism was to lob a cruise missile into an aspirin plant.

The reality is that Clinton’s team was highly focussed on terrorism…but on terrorism as crime, as opposed to as an instrument of war. We focussed on identifying the actual perpetrators, and attempting to arrest them or cause their arrest.

This is pretty much the typical liberal response to 9/11. Send in SWAT, pull ’em out in cuffs, and let’s sit back and watch the fun on Court TV.

I’ve been ambivalent about whether this is a good strategy conceptually, and looking at the history…in which we’re batting about .600 in arresting and trying Islamist terrorists…I have come to the realization that the fact is that it hasn’t worked. The level and intensity of terrorist actions increased, all the way through 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan.

And a part of what I have realized is that as long as states – particularly wealthy states – are willing to explicitly house terrorists and their infrastructure, or implicitly turn a blind eye to their recruitment and funding, we can’t use the kind of ‘police’ tactics that worked against Baader-Meinhof or the Red Army Faction. The Soviet Union and it’s proxies offered limited support to these terrorist gangs, but they didn’t have a national population to recruit from and bases and infrastructure that only a state can provide.

So unless we shock the states supporting terrorism into stopping, the problem will get worse. Note that it will probably get somewhat worse if we do…but that’s weather, and I’m worried about climate.

Now VT and others who disagree can argue – I’m obviously interested in arguing this, or I wouldn’t be putting this up as a post – but that implies a counterargument, or at least facts that counter the theory. I don’t see VT’s claims as rising to that level; I’m posting this so he (?) doesn’t feel like I’m neglecting a serious response to the specific claims that were made.

There is a philosophical ‘the buck stops here’ kind of point to make, but that’s not how I’m reading VT’s comment.

I’ll second the general point that’s been made that apportioning operational blame for the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks is something that can be readily shared between Clinton and Bush. Clinton had more time, but a) it happened on Bush’s watch, and b) he’s accountable for his failure to clean house and really shake up the bureaucracies in response to the failure.

I’m willing to grant that either party is roughly equal in competence in managing the bureaucracy (although I’ll also grant that this is subject to debate). I’d rather, first, be debating the doctrines they are going to instill into that bureaucracy, and here in my view Clinton comes up short.

It’s not clear he had any options, given the historic moment and political climate here and abroad. But I’ll take Bush’s doctrine to date over Clinton’s. My judgment is out on Kerry’s, until I actually figure out what his doctrine might be.

Go click here immediately to see the website of a Russian motorcyclist who regularly travels through and photographs the Chernobyl ‘Dead Zone’.

Her writing is first-rate (I’ll excuse her English) and her photographs have so much emotional impact that I’m going to spend the rest of the week thinking about them.

Note that this isn’t some ‘Soviets Bad’ or Atomic Energy Bad’ site; she’s just sifting through the detritus of a tragedy, and because so few can (I assume she has some kind of special access from her comments) it is preserved. She makes the analogy to Pompeii, and it’s a good one.

Josh Marshall has an extensive post up on the continuing war between the GOP and Dems over Clarke.

I’m not overly interested in the tactical elements of this war; what I’m interested in is seeing of there are grownups at some level of the U.S. Government – my government that can somehow stop this crap.

Here’s the problem.

A Damn Bad Thing happened – a series of attacks against our people and places that culminated in an act of war on 9/11. In the decade or so leading up to this, we didn’t do enough, which is, in part why it happened.

In the next decades, while we try and reduce the number of people willing to engage in these kind of acts – by bribing, converting, or killing them – we ought to not make the same mistakes. We’ll make different mistakes, and we will be attacked, make no mistake about that. But it would be nice to have a reasonably objective and levelheaded look at what happened.

It’d be even better to have a government in place – and here I point at both sides of the aisle that was capable of taking such a reasonable and levelheaded look.

As long as I’m wishing, can I have a pony?Marshall says:

What this is about isn’t Condi Rice or Richard Clarke or even George W. Bush. It’s about what happened — finding out what happened. One side wants to find out; the other doesn’t. This whole story turns on that simple fact. Why else try to destroy Clark unless what he has to say is profoundly damaging? Liars are usually easily discredited; it’s the truth-tellers who need to be destroyed.

and adds:

I have no stake in Richard Clarke. I think he’s a hero because I’m quite confident (on the basis of very strong evidence) that he’s telling the truth and now facing the whirlwind that we all knew these folks would bring against him.

Daniel Drezner actually neatly lays out my issues with Clarke:

Did I stack the deck in the second set of bullet points? Absolutely. My point, however, is that Clarke stacked the deck in the first set of bullet points.

Why would he do this? Some will say it’s because Clarke is a partisan hack, which isn’t really credible — he voted in the Republican primary in 2000, served under three Republican presidents, and already vowed not to advise Kerry. My hunch is that it’s more simple and personal than that. Let’s rework those bullet points one last time:

It is also the story of four presidents:

* Ronald Reagan, during which I was just a State Department DAS and therefore had marginal influence;

* George H.W. Bush, whose Secretary of State demoted me;

* Bill Clinton, who was wise enough to listen to my sage advice and let me run the Principals meetings on counterterrorism;

* George W. Bush, who had the gall to strip me of the hard-won autonomy and power I achieved under Clinton and force me to work through the regular chain of command

I’m sorry, but Marshall, and the rest of the anti-Administration chorus are just singing a different part than those in the Administration – it’s still the same music…

BAKER
Wait a minute, magic beans
For a cow so old
That you had to tell
A lie to sell
It, which you told!
Were they worthless beans?
Were they oversold?
Oh, and tell us who
Persuaded you
To steal that gold.

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD (To Jack)
See, it’s your fault.

JACK
No!

BAKER
So it’s you fault…

JACK
No!

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD
Yes, it is!

JACK
It’s not!

BAKER
It’s true.

JACK
Wait a minute-
But I only stole the gold
To get my
Cow back from you!

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD (To Baker)
So it’s your fault!

JACK
Yes!

And personally, I’m tired of it.

The Democrats (including Marshall) are furious at Bush for not walking into a trap. As noted before, the leaked Democratic intelligence committee memos made that clear:

1) Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by administration officials. We are having some success in that regard…

3) Prepare to launch an independent investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation at any time– but we can only do so once. The best time to do so will probably be next year…

Summary

Intelligence issues are clearly secondary to the public’s concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq. Yet, we have an important role to play in the revealing the misleading — if not flagrantly dishonest methods and motives — of the senior administration officials who made the case for a unilateral, preemptive war. The approach outline above seems to offer the best prospect for exposing the administration’s dubious motives and methods.

Note that the conclusion precedes the investigation.

Bush isn’t faultless in this; and his team is playing thug-style hockey right alongside the Democrats when they should be winning the war.

And I’m going to have to vote for one of them in November.

Mickey Kaus, fellow Norman and depressed Democrat, has an interesting nugget buried in his story on Bush’s ‘WMD Joke’ speech.

P.P.S.: The soldier sitting closest to me clearly liked Bush, perhaps because he had just seen the president, in person, for the third time. Apparently, Bush pays regular visits to wounded soldiers at Walter Reed. Did you know that? I didn’t. Admittedly, it’s easier to visit the wounded than to go to funerals, which Bush has been accused of not doing enough of. Still …

Honestly, I’m not shilling for Bush. I’m just trying to figure the guy out.

Here’s a letter from Rep. Christopher Shays (letterhead clipped when I squared the text up) back in July of 2000, criticizing Richard Clarke for presenting a ‘Most Wanted’ list as an antiterror strategy. Vodkapundit also has a text version of this scanned letter:

I’m assuming these are genuine…and if so, look forward to the next round.

I consider Phil Carter one of the two or three smartest people blogging about foreign and military affairs. So I’m completely puzzled at this:

Update V: David Frum, a former Bush Administration speech writer who now pens a ‘blog for the National Review, has an interesting take on the Clarke allegations from the perspective of someone who served in the same GWB West Wing.
bq.. “I have yet to read his book, but I have studied his interview, and I think I understand his argument.

Clarke seems to have become so enwrapped in the technical problems of terrorism that he has lost sight of its inescapably political context. One reason that his line of argument did not get the hearing in the Bush administration that he would have wished was that he did tend to present counter-terrorism as a discrete series of investigations and apprehensions: an endless game of terrorist whack-a-mole.

The Bush administration thought in bigger and bolder terms than that. They favored grand strategies over file management. Clarke may have thought that he was dramatizing his case by severing the threat from al Qaeda from its context in the political and economic failures of the Arab and Islamic world.

And this propensity continues.

The huge dividing line in the debate over terror remains just this: Is the United States engaged in a man-hunt – for bin Laden, for Zawahiri, for the surviving alumni of the al Qaeda training camps? – or is it engaged in a war with the ideas that animated those people and with the new generations of killers who will take up the terrorist mission even if the US were to succeed in extirpating every single terrorist now known to be alive and active? Clarke has aligned himself with one side of that debate – and it’s the wrong side.

p. What’s Mr. Frum saying? Is he saying that Mr. Clarke’s allegations were right, but that he just wasn’t articulate enough to sell his agenda to the President? Is Mr. Frum, who was part of the White House political apparatus, saying that Mr. Clarke’s real failures were political — not factual? Did the Bush Administration really ignore a national security threat because one of its advisors couldn’t find a way to sell the problem politically? If true, this statement by Mr. Frum is a damning indictment of the entire White House and National Security Council, and it indicates a near-total breakdown of the national security process. The idea behind the NSC staff, intelligence community, Joint Chiefs, and all the other systems in the national security process is to professionalize the decisions of the President in this area — not to politicize them. Now comes Mr. Frum, saying essentially that the White House ignored its in-house expert on terrorism because he couldn’t package it well enough.

No, Phil, that’s not it. What Frum is saying is pretty obvious, and echoes what a lot of folks (including me) have been saying; that the notion that 9/11 was caused by an isolated group of bad actors – and that the appropriate response is to capture (or kill) that select group of bad actors – is just wrong. It’s the doctrine that the Clinton team followed pre 9/11, and which they executed pretty darn well.

It was wrong.

Frum is arguing that the alternative to ‘whack a mole’ is to unplug the mechanism which keeps popping moles up, and that to do that, you have to change state behavior – a political act and a political decision. Clarke isn’t being criticized for not playing office politics enough in selling his message, he’s being criticized for selling a message which ignored the geopolitics of what is going on.

I can’t believe that Phil doesn’t see that (note that this doesn’t suggest that he necessarily has to agree with it, just that he’s busting Frum for making a different argument than he’s actually making).

First, here in reality, a good friend is moving and asked me to store his firearms until he gets a safe set up in his new home. That seems to me to be a good hook to use to remind everyone who owns guns that you are responsible for your firearms. Leaving them lying around the house unsecured means that your child, a visitors child, or the local teenage burglar could wind up with it – with consequences you really don’t want to think about. Years ago, I had a handgun stolen from my car by parking valets, and while I called the police on the spot, it was never recovered. To this day, I worry about what happened to it, and what it was used for. And I no longer have weapons that are not under my direct personal control or behind a meaningful lock.

There are rapid-access safes for handguns and long guns that make your firearm as easy to get to as pulling it from a drawer. There’s really no excuse not to secure firearms

I take this tack because I believe that owning firearms here in the U.S. is a right – but like all rights, it comes inextricably bound with responsibilities. You can’t have one – a right – without the other – a responsibility, and yet for some reason I keep running into people who believe that you can.
One responsibility those who own weapons have is to use them responsibly. The recent case cited by Instapundit and Kim du Toit, among others, in which a British citizen was jailed for killing a home-invader with a sword is a good one to start with. It turns out that the stabber was a drug dealer and stabbed the stabee in the back. Kim thinks this is righteous.

Let me make my position on this perfectly clear. I know what the law says about self-defense on one’s property, and as far as I’m concerned, the law is an ass.

If a goblin invades your property, he should be fair game, whether he’s coming or going. End of story. I don’t care if he “no longer poses a threat” or similar bleeding-heart bullshit.

Sorry, Kim, that’s equally bullshit. This is an endless topic of discussion within the gun community, with a substantial group taking Kim’s position – Shoot, Shovel, Shut Up – and a larger group, I believe taking mine.

I come to my position very simply; I’ve talked and trained with a number of people who have Seen The Elephant; who have shot others as a LEO or soldier. These range from situations in which they were SWAT snipers, who shot hostage-takers in a bank robbery to sudden, brutal street shootouts.

Not one of them – not a single one – would take Kim’s position. None of them are twitching psych basket cases, paralyzed by post-traumatic stress. None of them would hesitate to do it again, if called on. But every one of them wishes it had worked out another way. It’s simple, not one of them would shoot a burglar holding his VCR simply for being in his home.

So in a question of moral, rather than practical, judgment, I’ll go with the people who have experience.

Note that there’s an interesting distinction to draw between what I think is OK for states to do and what I don’t think it’s OK for individuals within a state to do. A later post…

Now, remember that I’m the guy who thinks that owning weapons isn’t only a right, but a bit of a moral imperative.

2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.

When I have a gun in my possession, I am suddenly both more aware of my environment, and more careful and responsible for my actions in it. People who I know who carry guns daily talk about how well-behaved they are how polite they suddenly become. Heinlein wrote that “an armed society is a polite society”, and while in truth I cannot make a causal connection, when you look at societies where the codes of manners were complex and strong, from medieval Europe or Japan to Edwardian England, there was a wide distribution of weapons.

I know several people who are either highly skilled martial artists or highly skilled firearms trainers, and in both groups there is an interesting correlation between competence (hence dangerousness) and a kind of calm civility … the opposite of the “armed brute” image that some would attempt to use to portray a dangerous man or woman.

And in light of that, I’ll echo Kim’s endorsement of Aaron The Liberal Slayer‘s (not this liberal, buddy…) suggestion that April 15 be termed ‘Buy A Gun Day’. Note that unlike Kim, I’m not asking for donations to buy a different gun – I’m all handgunned up (I shoot Glocks these days), and am a firm believer in Jeff Cooper’s adage ‘Beware the man who owns only one gun…he can probably use it.‘

And if you can’t buy a gun, let me suggest ‘Take An Unarmed Liberal Shooting Day‘ as a fallback. Either one ought to sufficiently get Michael Moore’s baggy drawers in a knot.

Lots of discussion of Grand Strategy today, triggered in large part by the killing of Sheikh Yassin, the Clarke book, and the 9/11 Commission testimony.

I think that this discussion is a good thing; I don’t think we discussed these things enough, or were explicit enough, and that it cost us.

And I’ll note that Robert Tagorda, and the Oxblog-derived Nathan Hale society are having a meeting Sunday night here in Los Angeles that I’m going to try and attend.

Two posts, one from Matt Yglesias, and one from Kevin Drum (at his new big-journalism home) touch on related issues.Matthew writes:

I wouldn’t want to deny “that remaking Iraq is a vital part of the war on terror because it will help to remake the Middle East, terrorism’s primary source” and that, in this sense, the second Gulf War is a part of the war on terror. Rather, I would want to deny some of the following:

* It was important to invade in 2003, rather than devoting additional resources to nation-building in Afghanistan and direct anti-Qaeda efforts, leaving the Iraq issue for a later day.

* It is likely today (or was likely based on the evidence available in 2003) that a Bush-led invasion of Iraq will lead to the emergence of a stable, democratic Iraq.

One could go on. The general point I would like to make — Daniel Davies’ “anti this war now left” idea — is this. There are policies that fit under the general heading “invade Iraq” and, especially, “promote Middle East transformation” that I would be happy to support. It does not follow, however, that I should support any policy that parades under the banner “invade Iraq to promote Middle East transformation.” In particular, I don’t believe that the actual policies Bush has been implementing are likely to achieve this goal. My dispute with the administration, therefore, is a somewhat narrow one, not a grand clash of ideas.

It’s interesting to me, because while I’ve read him as antiwar, I’ve felt that – like me – he started out wobbling on the fence on it through 2002. But he fell off on the other side and, I think, has consistently taken a fairly dark view of the decision to invade and the management of the aftermath.

What’s interesting to me is that he’s skating close to what I have wondered about for a while – the position that the war would have been OK if only it hadn’t been prosecuted by Bush.

I’m not sure if this is foreign policy insight, legitimate criticism of real missteps, or a simple unflinching partisanship which can’t acknowledge that the other side could do anything right. And that distinction matters, because if I could unpack it, I think I’d have a greater level of comfort in much of the debate I’m hearing around our current state of affairs.

Then Kevin Drum takes off from a discussion on Israel’s decision to kill the Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin and raises a question:

For anyone who’s serious about this stuff, these questions deserve an answer:

* Is it enough to simply build up homeland defenses and hunt down terrorist leaders? This is essentially what Sharon is doing.

* Or is it necessary to also have a grander strategy of engaging the hearts and minds of the Arab world and spreading democracy? This is (allegedly) the strategy of the Bush administration.

I’m not sure you can have it both ways. If hunting down terrorists is enough, then Sharon is doing the right thing and Bush deserves criticism for wasting time in an unnecessary Iraqi adventure. But if long term success requires a serious effort to spread democracy and change local attitudes, then Bush’s approach is defensible while Sharon is doomed to failure.

The United States is bigger than Israel, so the scope of our operations will naturally be bigger. But within our respective spheres, I have to believe that we’re dealing with roughly the same problem and roughly the same kind of people. So what’s the right strategy? Who’s doing it right and who’s doing it wrong?

I think Kevin is asking the wrong question. There’s not a chance in hell that Israel could ‘remake’ the Middle East, except by leaving, or by nuking the Arab states – neither of which, fortunately, seems like a plausible option right now. The U.S., on the other hand, has a plausible chance to (note the element of risk and probability).

Israel and the U.S. face substantially different manifestations of the same problem. Solving our problem can also solve Israel’s. Solving Israel’s problem could go some ways toward solving ours, but wouldn’t, because the anti-Western ‘rage of the oppressed’ would still be there. The key is to start them down a road that makes them less oppressed.

My support for Bush’s policies to date comes from my belief (not rising to certainty, by any means) that this was and is the only path that gets us from here to there. I’m open to hearing other suggestions, but, to be honest, haven’t yet.

Go read Daniel Drezner on Richard Clarke, one of the most sensible commentaries on the subject that I’ve seen. Two key quotes:

So, does Clarke have a personal incentive to stick it to this administration? Absolutely. Does he know what he’s talking about? Absolutely. Can what he says can be ignored? Absolutely not.

and

55 years ago, George Kennan and Paul Nitze had different positions on how to wage a containment policy, with Nitze taking a much more aggressive posture in NSC-68 than Kennan did in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” I’m not sure that it’s ever been decided which position was right. The same will likely be true of current debates.

Update: The Washington Post has a good editorial on this as well. Here’s a key quote…

Mr. Clarke describes Mr. Bush’s questions about a possible Iraqi role on the day after the Sept. 11 attacks as irrational; in fact, they were entirely reasonable. Iraq was an indisputable threat when Mr. Bush took office — one, like al Qaeda, that the Clinton administration had aptly described but failed to counter. Moreover, within days of asking those questions, Mr. Bush put Saddam Hussein on a back burner and ordered a U.S. military operation against al Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan — a tough decision that Mr. Clarke wrongly takes for granted.

What the former czar really objects to is the president’s move, some six months later, to expand the war on terrorism to Iraq and other rogue states capable of supplying terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Clarke, like Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and some others in the Democratic Party, argue for a narrower war, focused on al Qaeda. We disagree with that view, but it represents a legitimate alternative to Bush administration policy. Does Mr. Kerry support it? There — more than in the what-ifs about decisions made before Sept. 11 — lie the makings of an important debate.

What they said.

Out the door to a dinner, but here’s something to pass up the food chain.

Roadracing World, a motorcycle roadracing magazine and website I read regularly, intermittently publishes letters from riders and racers stationed over in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here’s an excerpt from one published today:

My former NCOIC was severely injured in a terrible roadside bomb yesterday. He was in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle commander’s hatch when it exploded and some shrapnel hit him in the back of the neck. Luckily the convoy he was in was right next to a U.S. base so they managed to air-evacuate him almost immediately. He spent about 6 hours in surgery and they almost declared him dead twice. They finally managed to stabilize him but they weren’t showing any brain activity. So basically they thought he had brain stem damage. But this morning he was doing better and they are putting him under observation for 2 days to see if the swelling in his brain goes down before they try to evacuate him to Germany. My soldiers are pretty upset. He is now the 3rd soldier that I personally know who has been killed or severely injured here. He had a month left to go–he has a wife and 3 kids back in Germany. We are all just praying for his recovery.

The other bad news is that for some reason the stupid idiots at the Corps level JAG are deciding to clean out the jails here in Iraq. Well, instead of letting out the low-level weapons violators they are letting out the terrorists that are involved in putting out these roadside bombs–because they claim that we don’t have enough evidence against them. In the last two weeks three major figures in the main bad guy group here have gotten out–and we have already seen the results as one of our unit’s informants has already been assassinated. So it seems like everything we have worked for for the last year and the 13 deaths our unit has sustained has been for nothing. We are all pretty discouraged.

If the latter is true, than someone needs to get hammered. We’re still at war, and to the extent that the JAG staff is applying peacetime public-defender standards (and remember, I’m the pro-defense attorney liberal) there’s something seriously wrong.

If anyone knows more about this, I’d love to hear about it.