Validating Clarke’s Charges.

Just when you think it can’t get more interesting, a former member of the Bush administration confirms Clarke’s charges.

My experience confirms what Clarke relates in his book. The Bush administration did ignore the threat of terrorism. It was focused on tax cuts, building a ballistic missile system, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty and rejecting the Kyoto Protocol.

Administration officials seemed to believe that the terrorist attacks on the United States in East Africa, and on the USS Cole, were due to Clinton’s moral failings. Since they didn’t share those weaknesses, and because President Bush had the blessing of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Justice Antonin Scalia, we would be spared any serious attack. Moral superiority would triumph.

I personally believe that Clarke was one of the most effective government officials I have ever worked with — most effective, but not the most loved. He has been described as a bureaucratic steamroller, and he no doubt ruffled some feathers, but who better to put in charge of counterterrorism? Unfortunately, he suffered the fate of Cassandra: He was able to foresee the future but not convince his leaders of the threat.

Despite its own failings, the Bush administration has conducted a scorched-earth smear campaign against Clarke, because his book threatens Bush’s carefully orchestrated image as a war president.

The president keeps repeating the mantra that America is safer now that Saddam is gone. But no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been found in Iraq, and Bush now admits that Saddam was not involved in 9/11. The future of a nuclear-armed Pakistan is far more important to our security than was Iraq.

We have also learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that the president spoke of overthrowing Saddam from the day he arrived in office. Clarke reports that on Sept. 12, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was already advocating bombing Iraq, even though Clarke told him that Iraq was not involved in the 9/11 attack.

We also know that some people who became members of the Bush administration had been advocating the overthrow of Saddam since 1996. The president’s claim that this was a war of necessity was never supported by the facts. But what better to stir up patriotic fervor in the run-up to an election than a war?

Is this too cynical?

Cynical, perhaps, but it’s real circumstances like these that justify cynicism. It makes me kind of weary, in a way. So many people were saying that the war against Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism before it even started, and they (we) have thus far been proven right. What’s more astounding to me is how many Americans still seem to believe that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. Astounding and saddening.

From my perspective, the Bush administration has practiced the most cynical, opportunistic form of politics I witnessed in my 28 years in government: hijacking legitimate American outrage and patriotism over 9/11 to conduct a pre-ordained war against Saddam Hussein.

That invasion was then misleadingly packaged as a war on terrorism and used to sell more tax cuts, the USA Patriot Act, oil drilling in ANWR, exemptions to environmental laws and other controversial programs. Those who have opposed the misguided invasion have been labeled appeasers and unpatriotic for failing to support “the troops” — meaning the president’s policies.

As Clarke has observed, the real war is against Al-Qaida. Instead, the Bush administration has involved us in a breath takingly cynical, unprovoked war against Iraq, under false pretenses, which it now uses to justify the reelection of a president who has violated the public trust.

The question is, who are the real cynics here?