Discrediting Clarke Won’t Stop the Debate He Helped Start

One of the most common mistakes in Washington is to reduce every policy dispute to a clash of personalities. That’s happening again in the debate over the Bush administration’s response to terrorism in the months before Sept. 11, 2001.

The media and the political community have simplified the issue to a cage match between White House national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and Richard Clarke, the former top counterterrorism official for presidents Bush and Clinton.

Clarke got in the first punch in his new book, “Against All Enemies,” with an unflattering portrayal of Rice. But Rice, the White House communications team and the president’s allies have been swarming over Clarke ever since.

In an extraordinary assault last week, they portrayed him as a disgruntled job seeker, a self-promoter looking to sell books, a hidden Democratic partisan (who somehow concealed his loyalties while working for presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush), and an unreliable witness whose past praise of President George W. Bush undermined his current criticism.

But this ferocious counterattack may have been too late. Even if the White House completely discredited Clarke with the public, which seems highly unlikely, the administration would still face tough questions over its initial approach to terrorists. The debate has moved beyond one man.

The reason is the findings by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. In several staff reports released last week, the commission detailed failures in the way both Clinton and Bush responded to terrorism. The reports suggest Clinton was deeply engaged by the problem but blinked at the riskiest military responses. As for Bush, the reports show that other officials shared Clarke’s fear that terrorism had slipped among the new administration’s priorities.

While incoming Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was extensively briefed on Al Qaeda, the commission staff reported, incoming Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld never arranged a briefing from Brian Sheridan, the Pentagon’s top counterterrorism official under Clinton. Other Pentagon counterterrorism officials told the commission “that they thought the new team was focused on other issues and was not especially interested in their counterterrorism agenda.” Sheridan still hadn’t been replaced by Sept. 11.

Likewise, while CIA Director George J. Tenet told the commission he believed Bush understood the threat, the commission found that other CIA officials grew concerned that the White House did not recognize the gravity of the danger when intelligence reporting on possible terrorist attacks “spiked” in the summer of 2001.

Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John E. McLaughlin and other officials, the staff reported, were “frustrated when some policymakers, who had not lived through such threat surges before, questioned the validity of the intelligence or wondered if it was disinformation.” McLaughlin told the commission “he felt a great tension ... between the new administration’s need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency.”

The reports also help explain Clarke’s own frustration over the Bush administration’s pace in settling on a counterterrorism strategy.

The commission staff documented that in January 2001, Clarke presented Rice with two documents from his work under Clinton that called for steadily escalating pressure on the Taliban to turn over Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, including increased aid to the Northern Alliance seeking to topple the Afghan government and a resumption of reconnaissance flights by the unmanned Predator while the U.S. military completed an armed version of the drone.

Though Clarke asked for a Cabinet-level meeting to quickly reach decisions, the commission confirmed the National Security Council routed this agenda into a committee of No. 2 officials. Those meetings, sometimes held as long as six weeks apart, stretched through the summer, while Clarke fumed over inaction on the Predator flights and aid to the Northern Alliance; the Cabinet-level principals did not meet specifically to consider the counterterrorism agenda until Sept. 4, 2001.

Meanwhile, the commission report noted, “The Principals Committee did meet frequently before 9/11 on other subjects ... including Russia, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East Peace Process.” When the administration finally approved its anti-terrorism strategy just before the attacks, the commission found, it largely followed Clarke’s initial recommendation of phased pressure on the Taliban culminating in efforts to overthrow the government if it did not surrender Bin Laden after about three years.

At last week’s commission hearings, Clarke wasn’t the only one who found the pace of that decision-making too leisurely. “What made you think ... given the history of Al Qaeda ... that we had the luxury even of seven months before we could make any kind of response?” former Republican Sen. Slade Gorton memorably asked Rumsfeld.

In his testimony, Clarke acknowledged that the Sept. 11 attacks could not have been prevented even if Bush had instantly approved every recommendation he made in January. And the reports show the administration did move on some fronts, such as pressuring Pakistan (though not Saudi Arabia, a focus of intense Clinton-era diplomacy) to urge the Taliban to surrender Bin Laden. Yet the reports’ overall picture mostly supports Clarke.

In this year’s election, most Americans will probably judge Bush more on his response to Sept. 11 than his actions before then (partly because most Americans may believe Clinton also failed to act aggressively enough). But the White House attempt to shift the focus to Clarke’s credibility is still unseemly, especially after the corroborating evidence the commission presented last week. Clarke isn’t alone in his charge that the Bush team moved too slowly to grasp the terrorist threat, and even silencing him would not end the debate he has ignited.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times’ website at www.latimes.com/brownstein.