Smackdown of the day
Owen responds to this quote by Wes Clark:
“Before 9/11, the president did not do everything he needed to make us safe. And after 9/11, he took us to a war we didn’t need to fight,” Clark said, referring to the war in Iraq.
Owen says:
Let me get this straight, Wes, Bush should have acted preemptively to thwart attacks before 9/11, but should have done nothing after 9/11? Boy, I sure would feel safer if Wes were running things.
Ouch!
February 10th, 2004 at 11:03 am
Wow, if that’s not a gross mischaracterization of what Clark was saying, I don’t know what is. Nowhere did Clark imply that we should have preemptively invaded a nation prior to 9/11. Also, nowhere did he imply that we should have done “nothing” after 9/11.
Two unavoidable truths:
So what exactly was wrong with Clark’s point again?
February 10th, 2004 at 3:02 pm
Yeah, Bush had a whole nine months to get comfortable in the role of president and solve the terrorism problem. Clinton didn’t solve it in 96 months, but Bush should have been on it in nice.
As to your second bullet point: so you’re saying we should have beat someone up, but not necessarily Iraq? Or are you arguing that Iraq wasn’t really a terrorist regime despite paying Palestinian homicide bombers?
February 10th, 2004 at 5:09 pm
Les:
Yeah, Bush had a whole nine months to get comfortable in the role of president and solve the terrorism problem.
Gee, you might have a point there, if Bush had done anything at all about terrorism in those nine months. Instead, as you’ll recall, he was withdrawing from the ABM treaty and pushing for a space-based missile defense shield.
And it may not bother you that the Bush Administration flatly ignored explicit counsel from the outgoing administration and from the CIA that terror needed to be a priority, but it sure as hell bothers me.
Did I expect him to “solve” the problem in nine months? Of course not. Did I expect him to at least give a shit about the problem, and do something about it, instead of waiting for 3,000 deaths? Hell yes, I did.
so you’re saying we should have beat someone up, but not necessarily Iraq? Or are you arguing that Iraq wasn’t really a terrorist regime despite paying Palestinian homicide bombers?
What I’m saying is that we should have finished the job in Afghanistan, and then used political and economic pressure (rather than brute force) against states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan (supposed allies) who harbor terrorists.
As for Iraq, sure, we should have addressed that problem, too, although preemptive invasion wouldn’t have been my preferred method. But one would think that terrorists that target us ought to be a higher priority than terrorists who do not target us. Even if you’re going to go after anti-Israeli terrorism, Iraq is hardly the place you’d start. Unless, of course, you were an idiot, or you had an unrelated ulterior motive for doing so. Either of those two could easily be applied to this administration…
February 11th, 2004 at 11:32 am
“And it may not bother you that the Bush Administration flatly ignored explicit counsel from the outgoing administration and from the CIA that terror needed to be a priority, but it sure as hell bothers me.”
Right, and the terrorist problem identified by the Clinton administration was so serious that they didn’t bother doing anything about it except to leave a note on the Oval Office door on their way out.
Hey, George.
We’re outta here. Key’s under the doormat. The toilet off the Lincoln bedroom runs. Just jiggle the handle and it usually stops.
P.S. Major doo-doo in the Middle East. Terrorism, Al Qaeda. The works.
Peace out!
Bill Clinton
February 11th, 2004 at 1:05 pm
Les:
I didn’t say that the actions of the previous administration weren’t flawed, but at least it was a priority for them. If successfully thwarting the Millennium Bombing plot constitutes “doing nothing,” then you have a simplistic world view concerning what being serious about terror means (“If we’re not blowing up some foreign country, we’re not doing anything.”).
Meanwhile, your boy Bush was funding the Taliban at least as recently as May of 2001:
(Story is about 3/4 of the way down the link, and ran prior to the September 11th attacks.)
If you’re genuinely interested in what Clinton did and what Bush did and where both failed with respect to terror, click here. It’s about as evenhanded an assessment as you’ll find, and it shows that your “P.S. Deep doo doo in the Middle East” jab is woefully errant.
February 11th, 2004 at 1:40 pm
Les.
Umm, no. Not even close. Not even on FOX news. And I am getting tired of your childish hero worship. I lost people I knew in the towers, and it sickens me to see someone treat this issue in the childish fashion you do. Grow up, deal with the facts, or kindly shut the hell up and leave the discussion to the grown-ups.
The Clinton administration took the threat of terrorism very seriously, and Bush’s team doesn’t appear to have:
Berger told Rice:
“As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning. According to both of them, he said that terrorism – and particularly Mr. bin Laden’s brand of it – would consume far more of her time than she had ever imagined”
Bill Clinton’s far-reaching plan to eliminate al Qaeda root and branch was completed only a few weeks before the inauguration of George W. Bush. If it had been implemented then, a former senior Clinton aide told Time, “we would be handing [the Bush Administration] a war when they took office.” Instead, Clinton and company decided to turn over the plan to the Bush administration to carry out. (Time magazine)
After Berger left, Rice stayed around to listen to counterterrorism bulldog Richard Clarke, who laid out the whole anti-al Qaeda plan. Rice was so impressed with Clarke that she immediately asked him to stay on as head of counterterrorism. (NYTIMES, Dec 30, 2001)
On April 30th, Clarke presented plan to the DOD. They acted immediately – by scheduling meetings to take place MONTHS in the future. They met at the end of July, but postponed meetings until September 4th – after Bush’s month-long August vacation. (Time again, as well as as NYTIMES, Dec 30th)
August 6, CIA Director Tenet delivered a report to President Bush entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The report warned that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack airplanes. Nothing was done. (Time)
On September 9, Congress proposed a boost of $600 million for antiterror programs. The money was to come from Rumsfeld’s beloved missile defense program, the eventual price tag of which was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at between $158 billion and $238 billion. Congress’s proposal to shift $0.6 billion over to counter-terror programs incurred Rummy’s ire, and he threatened a presidential veto. (NYTIMES)
Ashcroft’s first budget listed twelve top priorities. Anti-terrorism was not on that list. Ashcroft even proposed cutting anti-Terrorism programs, to make way for other budget priorities
Bush did nothing with the Hart-Rudman report, instead allowing Cheney six months to come up with a new report.
Bush removed a sub from the cost of Pakistan, reducing the chance of getting bin Laden – a sub Clinton had put there.(Time)
The Bush administration did not step in and settle the fight between the CIA and the DOD over who would use the new Predators, so we lost months of time and intelligence. That doesn’t sound like and Admin on top of the terrorist threat.(Time)
And none of this deals with the fact that Bush sat reading children’s books for twenty minutes, or the fact that Ashcroft stopped flying planes in July, or the piss poor response time the White House, the military, and the FAA all had on that day, or the fact that the 1994 WTC bombers are all in jail, or the fact that the Cole bombers – until they were allowed to escape after the Iraq invasion — were sitting in Yemeni jails, or the fact that the times Clinton did use military force, the Republicans screamed “Wag the dog!”. If someone had jumped started things, then maybe the people in the second tower would have been able to get out in time. Could the Bush Admin have prevented 9/11? Dunno. But I do know that it looks like they did not do everything they could have.
And while we are on the subject, please show me prominent Republican leader in 2000 saying that we should invade Afghanistan.