Karen Kwiatkowski: That audacious Richard Clarke

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That audacious Richard Clarke
The Bush-Cheney campaign is riding a rickety horse to November: Their approach to war on terror.

By Karen Kwiatkowski

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The Bush-Cheney campaign is riding a single horse to November: Their approach to war on terror. More and more, it seems the White House takes its war on terror about as seriously as it takes its war on steroids.

We might have known this earlier. In early 2000, Condoleeza Rice explained the Bush approach to security in Foreign Affairs magazine. In an article containing almost 7,000 words on national security, she mentions terrorism only five times: four in terms of rogue states like Iraq, and one referring to Chechnya. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, having repeatedly attacked U.S. military and diplomatic facilities and killed Americans in the 1990s, and against whom President Clinton had retaliated militarily, warranted not a single mention by the future national security advisor.

Bush himself has repeatedly confirmed Clarke's facts. The Bush-Cheney ticket has proven to be willfully blind to how terrorism works, and, consequently, how it can be reduced or eliminated. It is a strange cold fact that human and physical resources were prematurely and carelessly shifted from the effort to root out al-Qaida in Afghanistan to fuel the long-favored neoconservative goal of rooting out Saddam Hussein in Iraq


http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/31/clarke/index.html