Less than 6 weeks before the election, Democrats are engaged in a debate about Clinton's record. Dicks Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Cantbelieverlies are out there swatting down what they claim are Clinton's lies. None of what they say is true, but this is the debate. Meanwhile...
Torture, Iraq, the NIE report and Afghanistan have been supplanted in the news by Clinton vs. Bush on who did a better job of not finding bin Laden.
Not one to put words in anyone's mouth, but imagine if Clinton had made one comment (the right one) about his actions by referencing the 9/11 report, then gone on to passionately condemn Bush about his failures since, including one of the the most damaging: sanctioned torture.
The media would have been left with only one solid comment to try to spin, if they even could, since the report vindicates Clinton:
Transcript of Rice's 9/11 commission statement
Wednesday, May 19, 2004 Posted: 0425 GMT (1225 HKT)
Snip...
KEAN: ...And yet, you walk in and Dick Clarke is talking about al Qaeda should be our number-one priority. Sandy Berger tells you you'll be spending more time on that than anything else.
Snip...
RICE: Well, in fact, Mr. Chairman, it was not new information. I think we all knew about the 1998 bombings. We knew that there was speculation that the 2000 Cole attack was al Qaeda. There had been, I think, documentaries about Osama bin Laden.
I, myself, had written for an introduction to a volume on bioterrorism done at Sanford that I thought that we wanted not to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden had succeeded on our soil.
It was on the radar screen of any person who studied or worked in the international security field.
But there is no doubt that I think the briefing by Dick Clarke, the earlier briefing during the transition by Director Tenet, and of course what we talked with about Sandy Berger, it gave you a heightened sense of the problem and a sense that this was something that the United States had to deal with.
I have to say that of course there were other priorities. And indeed, in the briefings with the Clinton administration, they emphasized other priorities: North Korea, the Middle East, the Balkans.
RICE: One doesn't have the luxury of dealing only with one issue if you are the United States of America. There are many urgent and important issues.
But we all had a strong sense that this was a very crucial issue. The question was, what do you then do about it?
And the decision that we made was to, first of all, have no drop- off in what the Clinton administration was doing, because clearly they had done a lot of work to deal with this very important priority.
And so we kept the counterterrorism team on board. We knew that George Tenet was there. We had the comfort of knowing that Louis Freeh was there.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/08/rice.transcript/index.htmlFinally, the White House reversed position on Tuesday about statements it had made about Clarke. On Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney said that Clarke had been "out of the loop" in the months before the 9/11 attacks. But The New York Times reports that Ms. Rice said Tuesday that this was not the case and that Clarke "was very much involved in the administration's fight against terrorism."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0325/dailyUpdate.html New glimpses of Bush worldview
By Peter Grier and Faye Bowers | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – An extraordinary fortnight of revelations about US preparedness before Sept. 11 has provided at least this preliminary picture: When the Bush foreign policy team took office in 2000, it was determined to focus on big nations and traditional power geopolitics, not Al Qaeda and the new terrorist threat.
The Clinton people? Sure, they'd made terrorism a priority. But top Bush officials were dismissive of their predecessors' performance, and determined to avoid what they felt were Clintonesque mistakes.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0401/p01s01-usfp.html (March 27, 2004 -- 03:00 AM EDT // link)
Snip...
At the beginning of 2000, Condi Rice wrote an
article in Foreign Affairs outlining the sort of foreign and national security policy America should pursue. It was published as part of the journal's treatment of the 2000 election and in the article Rice was identified as one of then-candidate George W. Bush's foreign policy advisors. The article was intended to be a quasi-official statement of Bush's policies for the foreign policy elite -- the folks who read Foreign Affairs.
I read the piece at the time, or near after, and it was certainly very widely read by people in the foreign policy community.
I mention it now because this evening a reader reminded me of it and brought a now-pertinent fact to my attention. In the article Rice notes five key foreign policy priorities. Only the last made any mention of terrrorism and it was: "to deal decisively with the threat of rogue regimes and hostile powers, which is increasingly taking the forms of the potential for terrorism and the development of weapons of mass destruction."
Her article then elaborates on each of the five priorities and takes up the fifth toward the end of the piece.
It's well worth linking through and reading.
Not only does she not mention al Qaida or Osama bin Laden, she scarcely even mentions terrorism in the sense we now generally understand it. Her discussion is about North Korea, Iraq and Iran -- rogue states that might threaten the US with weapons of mass destruction (primarily with the use of missiles) -- and, to a much lesser extent, state-sponsored terrorism from Iran.
The key policy prescription for this section is contained in this paragraph ...
One thing is clear: the United States must approach regimes like North Korea resolutely and decisively. The Clinton administration has failed here, sometimes threatening to use force and then backing down, as it often has with Iraq. These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them. Rather, the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence -- if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration. Second, we should accelerate efforts to defend against these weapons. This is the most important reason to deploy national and theater missile defenses as soon as possible, to focus attention on U.S. homeland defenses against chemical and biological agents, and to expand intelligence capabilities against terrorism of all kinds.
The central policy recommendation is national missile defense -- a defensive capacity aimed at states. And though there is mention of chemical and biological agents and the need to "expand intelligence capabilities against terrorism of all kinds" even a quick read of the entire section shows clearly that ideologically-based transnational terrorism simply wasn't on her radar as a significant threat to the United States.
There's no mention of Afghanistan or the madrassas in Pakistan, the importance of knocking down terrorist financial networks, Islamist sleeper cells in American or Germany. None of it.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_03_21.phpThe point is Clinton took the megaphone and instead of shining a light on today's failures, he decided to fight a battle from 2001. He no doubt has a right to do this, but after five years of silence, why now?
As Karyn pointed out why make this election a referendum on Clinton?
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
