"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Kevblog Archives
Mad as Hell
9 p.m., March 29, 2004
I'm one of the four score Americans now watching commentator Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. He's just wrapped up giving his "Real Deal" commentary. I've never seen this fellow before. A quick Google tells me he's a Republican former congressman from Florida and one-time appointee of President Bush to the Labor Department's Council on the 21st Century Workforce. And, no real accident, I'm sure, he looks rather like Bill O'Reilly.
Anyway, the fair Mr. Scarborough is batting about .500 by me. He argues that the Bush White House has unnecessarily blown it by refusing to allow National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice to testify before the 9-11 committee. I agree with that, but not for the same reason he argues.
Joe thinks that the White House has nothing to hide because it's right about its rationale for war in Iraq. You'd have to ask first before agreeing with him, which rationale would that be? But he has an answer: The war is right because we've unseated an evildoer.
No. The war was not right, even though we did unseat one bigtime bad boy. The war was wrong for all the classic Clauswitzian reasons that Vietnam was wrong. The rationale for going in was confused, the strategy for the aftermath was unformed and the population was unprepared---it clearly would not have bought into war but for deception on the part of this administration about weapons of mass destruction.
Now we can argue that last point--and I would allow Colin Powell's statement of February 2001 on Saddam Hussein's state of toothlessness and his assumed inability to threaten his neighbors to stand for me. But I want to get onto Joe Scarborough's second point, which is about Richard Clarke.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm getting a little tired of Richard Clarke's face and voice. I think maybe he should take a break from the talk-show circuit and let his book sell itself for a while. But I also think the Joe Scarborough-Bob Novak-Bill Frist take on Clarke is way off the mark.
Scarborough decries the idea that Clarke is "making a million dollars off the victims of 9-11" by publishing his book. (And what is Scarborough's salary for doing essentially the same thing as a commentator on MSNBC?) I'm a little surprised to hear staunch conservatives begrudge good old-fashioned capitalistic book peddling, but let's let that pass. And let's talk about what Clarke is really doing.
It's obvious from the vehement reaction against his "60 Minutes" appearance and from the polls that I'm in the minority. That's nothing new. But my gut tells me Richard Clarke is a man who simply is calling it as he sees it. And, not coincidentally, he sees it as I do: In allegorical terms, we're being led into a deep, black tunnel populated by armed bandits with night goggles. We don't know where we are, nor how to turn back and we can't see our way clear to the other side. We're blinded. And unseen spooks are shooting at us. Or soon will be.
The invasion of Iraq is a distraction from the war on terrorism, meaning the war in Afghanistan, against the Taliban, against al Queda. And it has made us not safer, but less safe. Howard Dean was right when he said it, Richard Clarke is right when he says it. Madrid proved that, if Istanbul hadn't already. (Watch for al Queda's next blow-'em-up show to strike London any day now. And then, I'd wager, the American homeland.) We've stirred up the hornets, and the hornets hate us. Worse, we've our missed our chance to burn out the hive before the pests multiplied; we're now becoming awash in them.
As to Clarke, is it so hard in this day and age--under these circumstances--to believe that a man of conviction might come forward in righteous anger? I think it's hard to argue that Clarke is anything but the real deal. He's a career bureaucrat, obsessive about fighting terrorism. He's a bulldog, the kind of guy who loses friends by pushing hard for what he thinks is right, but wins admirers for exactly the same thing.
Does that make Clarke a hero? Or a flawless figure? Hardly, as this column suggests. He's got his warts. He might be rewriting his own history a bit and might be wrong in what he says now, though the bulk of it jibes with everything we've learned to this point from the likes of Paul O'Neill and others--including President Bush, as quoted by Bob Woodward in the book "Bush at War."
However, alone among all the principals in charge of our security on Sept. 11, Clarke has had the courage to show humility while all the others were simply explaining why it wasn't their fault. And dammit, calculated or otherwise, taking responsibility counts for something. John Kennedy knew that. Does this president?
Imagine the temerity of a Senate majority leader standing before his colleagues to suggest that Clarke had no right to apologize to the American people for his own failure, and the failure of the government that employed him, for what happened Sept. 11. Imagine the depths that we’ve sunk to when an apology is no longer just, as a John Wayne movie character once suggested, a sign of weakness. Now it is a sign of weakness capped by malevolent intent.
Fact is, there is very little in what Clarke says that is new. The Aug. 4, 2002, Time magazine piece--the one Clarke did his now infamous off-the-record briefing about, said all these same things. Even Al Franken wrote about it, in a chapter of his “Lying Liars� book titled “Operation Ignore.�
I think Clarke is right: The White House has unleashed the hounds, both within administration ranks and within the right-wing media echo chamber. He is being excoriated for his candor, his "disloyalty." He’s being branded a peon of the left. He is not.
He is something much simpler, from where I stand. He is mad as hell, and no matter how much mud and blood they rub into his face, he’s not going to take it anymore.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly
