By
Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
| John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 commission, put it bluntly
to former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke when he testified publicly
last week: Why did his earlier, private testimony to the commission not
include the harsh criticism leveled at President Bush in his book? "There's a very good reason for that," Clarke replied. "In the 15 hours of testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq. And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism." The furious charge and countercharge between Clarke and the White House last week has largely obscured this central complaint by Clarke. The commission investigating the 2001 attacks is not charged with probing this question, so little of the public testimony in recent days dwelled on Iraq. Politically, however, it is potentially just as important for Bush to deal with that assertion as it is for him to address the claim that he was not properly focused on the al Qaeda threat in the first eight months of his presidency. Clarke, in his book, echoes other accounts, such as Ron Suskind's book on former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, that key administration officials appeared unduly focused on Iraq in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks -- and then leapt to the conclusion that Iraq was somehow involved. Clarke depicts the president as tersely demanding that his staff look for links between the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq. He charges that, for Bush and his advisers, attacking Iraq was "a rigid belief, received wisdom, a decision already made and one that no fact or event could derail." In the end, through the Iraq war, "we delivered to al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable." Clarke's complaint resonates with some other former administration officials. Rand Beers, who served as counterterrorism chief after Clarke, has voiced the same complaint and is now foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry (Mass.). Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and Middle East specialist who left Bush's National Security Council staff a year ago, also agrees. "Clarke's critique of administration decision-making and how it did not balance the imperative of finishing the job against al Qaeda versus what they wanted to do in Iraq is absolutely on the money," Leverett said. He said that Arabic-speaking Special Forces officers and CIA officers who were doing a good job tracking Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and other al Qaeda leaders were pulled out of Afghanistan in March 2002 to begin preparing for the war against Iraq. "We took the people out who could have caught them," he said. "But even if we get bin Laden or Zawahiri now, it is two years too late. Al Qaeda is a very different organization now. It has had time to adapt. The administration should have finished this job." Jessica Stern, Harvard University lecturer and author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill," also agrees with Clarke. "It was a distraction on the war on terrorism and made it more difficult to prosecute because the al Qaeda movement used the war in Iraq to mobilize new recruits and energize the movement," she said. "And we apparently sent Special Forces from Afghanistan, where they should have been fighting al Qaeda, to Iraq." But Eliot Cohen, director of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and an advocate of attacking Iraq, argues that Clarke's analysis wrongly assumes the battle against terrorism paralyzes the government when it comes to waging other wars. He said that if one assumes that the fight against terrorism is a multi-year effort that could stretch decades, then "there is nothing the U.S. government can do for 30 years but fight al Qaeda." He noted that the bulk of the fighting in Iraq was carried out by military units, such as the 101st Airborne, that were not involved in Afghanistan. Cohen agreed, however, that a war the scale of the Iraq invasion could divert the attention of senior officials from other issues, such as fighting terrorism. Pat Lang, who was head Middle East and South Asia intelligence in the Defense Intelligence Agency for seven years, said: "When you commit as much time and attention and resources as we did to Iraq, which I do not believe is connected to the worldwide war against the jihadis, then you subtract what you could commit to the war on terrorism. You see that especially in the Special Forces commitment, as we have only so many of them." The Bush administration has long argued that the campaign against Iraq was a continuation of the war on terrorism. In the past week, administration officials were generally not asked direct questions about whether the war interfered with the campaign against terrorists, but have tried to rebut the charge that officials were focused on Iraq even as they launched a war against Afghanistan. Clarke's description of the discussions about Iraq's possible involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks is generally consistent with other accounts, such as the one in the book, "Bush at War," by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in his public testimony before the commission Tuesday, confirmed that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz -- a forceful advocate of attacking Iraq -- "raised the issue of whether or not Iraq should be considered for action during this time." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in an interview with network correspondents Wednesday, said, "The president asked if Iraq was complicit. Anybody should have asked whether Iraq was complicit given our history with Iraq." But, she added, Bush was told by CIA Director George J. Tenet before they went to Camp David the weekend after the attacks "there was no evidence of that." Woodward, in "Bush at War," wrote that the president ended the debate at Camp David that weekend by saying, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now. I don't have the evidence at this point." Clarke also caused a stir last week by saying that Bush, in his secret directive ordering the strike against Afghanistan six days after Sept. 11, also told the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq. The Washington Post had reported on this directive more than a year ago, generating no complaint from the administration. But in the context of the furor over Clarke, administration officials said the Iraq order actually involved contingency plans if Iraq tried to take advantage of the fact the United States was fighting in Afghanistan. "The idea that we were somehow sitting there thinking, 'Boy, we really wish we could do Iraq, not Afghanistan,' is just patently false," Rice said. But Woodward, whose book was based in large part on notes taken at National Security Council meetings, does not mention that the Iraq discussion involved such contingencies. Rather, Woodward reports extensively on an intense debate among senior officials whether an invasion was necessary shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Moreover, a senior administration official, in an interview with The Washington Post more than a year ago, said Pentagon officials used the language contained in Bush's Afghanistan directive to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq. |
Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.