What if Bush were to have done everything Dick Clarke now claims he had urged, or would have urged, Bush to do?

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What if Bush were to have done everything Dick Clarke now claims he had urged, or would have urged, Bush to do?·

Part of what is most offensive about Dick Clarke's arrogance is his willingness to convey to Americans the false impression on CBS' 60 Minutes that if only everyone else had listened to him, 9-11 "might" have been prevented (even though he conceded under oath yesterday that even if Bush were to have followed every recommendation he made, it "would not have prevented" 9-11). Blaming Bush for 9-11 is even more unfair than blaming Clinton. Notwithstanding Bob Kerry's arguments to the contrary, no President could have realistically done in Afghanistan before 9-11 what Bush did after 9-11. What we now know in hindsight makes it abundantly clear that anything done in Afghanistan before 9-11 less than what Bush did after 9-11 would not only have been ineffective but would have made our situation dramatically worse.

Clarke's Hark--
Against All Inferiors-- My Inside War on Everyone Else's Errors.·

I'm Clarke, who had all of the answers
for stopping the terrorist cancer,
but people unfit
to step on my spit
rejected my cure for the cancer.

If Dubya had ordered the battle plans
I wrote for attacking Afghanistan
with cruise-missile bombs
in early '01,
I'm sure we'd have crippled the Taliban.

So-what if the rest of Afghanistan
and most of the Muslims in other lands
rejected our claim
"bin Laden's to blame"
for bombing our Cole in the Arab lands.

Though surely there would have been some
collateral damage by bombs,
so what if our "friends"
and Kofi's U.N.
decried "unilateral" bombs.

So-what if the friends of the Taliban
ensconced in the gov'ment of Pakistan
incensed by our bombs
gave dirty-nuke bombs
to Qaeda through friends in the Taliban?

So-what if we hadn't repealed
or broken the barrier sealed
to keep FBI
and CIA guys
from sharing the fruits of their fields?

So-what if the profile-type hunch
of Crowly¹ desiring to crunch
Moussaoui's hard drive
by law was denied
as based not on "cause" but on hunch?

My plan would've called-for alerting
the airlines of clues disconcerting
that Arabs would aim
to hijack some planes
to bargain for pris'ners returning.

So-what that to give such alert
would stress the old way to avert
the passengers' harm
by going along
and following hijackers' words?

So-what that such plan to avert
those dangers perversely would serve
the hijackers' aim
for flying the planes
at buildings where innocents worked?

So-what if applying my plan
stoked anger in Arabic lands
for bombs we'd been dropping
and would, 'stead of stopping,
have strengthened their Nine-One-One plan?

So-what if Eleven September's
attack would thus now be remembered
as retaliation
for bombing a nation
of Arabic-Taliban brethren?

So what if results of such view
so badly our image would skew
and limit our mission
to forge coalitions
to choices not many but few.

So what if my plan couldn't save
the thousands who went to their grave
that Nine-One-One Day,
I still could convey
how many al Qaedas we'd slain.

Since Clarke so arrogantly claims he had all the right answers, it's fair to hypothesize implementation what he now says Bush should have done to determine whether, on the basis of what we now know in hindsight, following his recommendations would have made the situation better or worse. What seems to have been the centerpiece of the tactics he misperceived as being the equivalent of a "strategy" was his recommendation that as soon as possible after taking office, Bush should have delayed plans to reconfigure the Predator to serve as a weapons platform to strike targets in real time by continuing to use the Predator to conduct surveillance to identify potential targets with the hope they would remain stationary for six hours to allow enough time for a cruise-missile to strike them.

Let's assume Bush were to have followed such strategy. Assume that in February, 2001, several Predators flying over Afghanistan (presumably without over-flight rights from any neighbor of that landlocked country) identify dozens of targets that appear to be Al-Qaeda/Taliban strongholds. Assume that on the basis of such information, we were to have launched several hundred (perhaps as many as a thousand) cruise missiles against such targets. Assume a very high percentage of such targets were destroyed without collateral damage. Since it's nearly a mathematical certainty that such strikes would not have been 100% successful in avoiding collateral damage, it's realistic to assume there would have been what much of the Arab world would have perceived as a slaughter of civilians in an Arab country still trying to recover from its war to evict the Russians. Unless we were to have been far luckier than it would be rational to assume, such strikes would have angered, but not destroyed, the al Qaeda leadership.

Soon after such attacks, Arab media in the Middle East would endlessly broadcast video tapes of Usama bin Laden and/or Ayman al-Zawahiri and/or Mullah Omar characterizing such action as the slaughter of Muslims by the American/Jewish "crusaders." Such tapes would predict swift and massive revenge against America. All but several members of the cells ready to launch 9-11 would have been already in the U.S. for quite a long time. They would maintain, or advance, but not abandon, their plans then in progress for the 9-11 attack. Many countries that were willing to help us fight terrorism (and topple the Taliban) after 9-11, would have refused to help us-- indeed, they would have characterized us as "terrorists" for attacking Afghanistan. (Remember, even after 9-11 and even after a tape surfaced in which bin Laden bragged about masterminding the 9-11 attack and laughed about the deaths he caused, a large majority of people in the Arab/Muslim world-- as well as many "intellectuals" in France-- believed the CIA and/or the Israelis, rather than Muslim fanatics, had committed the 9-11 attack and a large majority still viewed Operation Enduring Freedom as an example of the "Crusaders"--i.e., Americans and Jews-- attacking Islam?)

In the meantime, since Clarke's recommendations did not include, and Congress would not under any circumstances have passed, legislation like the Patriot Act to remove the legislatively-created "stove-pipe" barrier prohibiting the CIA and FBI from sharing intelligence information, the FBI could not have had access to the sea of dots possessed by the CIA and the CIA could not have had access to the sea of dots possessed by the FBI. (Furthermore, even if Bush could have waved a wand and "repealed" such stovepipe barriers, it was not technologically feasible for the CIA computers to share databases and information with the FBI computers and databases, and vice versa.

Furthermore, since Clarke's recommendations did not include, and Congress would not have enacted, laws to relax constitutional limitations on searches and seizures and to permit "profiling,"² of airline passengers to give special attention to passengers from, or appearing to be from, the Middle East or Muslim countries, Moussaoui's hard-drive still would not have been seized and the Arab hijackers would not have received the special scrutiny inherent in "profiling."

Additionally, since virtually all the "signs" in late-spring/early-summer 2001 indicating something "big" was about to happen indicated it would happen overseas and, to the extent those signs pointed to 'hijacking of airplanes," they indicated the purpose was expected to be the traditional purpose of taking the plane/passengers hostage in order to extract demands and/or obtain the release of imprisoned comrades. Therefore, heightened alerts to airline pilots would have underscored and reinforced the long-standing policy of cooperating with, rather than forcibly resisting, hijackers, which policy, paradoxically, virtually guaranteed the success of the hijackers' plans to commander the planes for use as missiles rather than traditional hostage-taking purposes. (Until 9-11, virtually no pilot and/or airline and/or politician would have urged the airlines to order pilots to forcibly resist hijackers and thereby place the passengers in great danger by doing so-- Remember, the passengers on the flight with Todd Beamer didn't resist until they learned the true nature of the mission-- otherwise, they probably would have sensibly remained passive during what they would have expected to be a "traditional" hijacking.

Against this backdrop, 9-11 would have occurred. The political recriminations we would be hearing today would be the Left screaming that if George Bush had not attacked Afghanistan, the hijackers wouldn't have committed the 9-11 atrocities. What I find so morally offensive by Clarke's "charges" is that he's used the imprimatur of his credentials as an "counter-terrorism expert" to given the survivors of the 9-11 victims the false impression that callous indifference by Bush led to the barbaric slaughter of their loved one. It's unforgivable.

One more thing, if CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC or NPR were to have obtained permission of an anti-Bush bureaucrat in the State Department or Defense Department to release the transcript of a "background" briefing contradicting something Donald Rumsfeld and/or Colin Powell and/or Condoleeza Rice were to have told the 9-11 Commission, Bob Kerrey would have lauded, rather than condemned, CNN, for having done so. Yet as a member of a panel ostensibly seeking the truth, he condemned Fox News for obtaining lawful permission to release information material to the credibility of Clarke. It's such blatant hypocrisy.

¹·See my May 31, 2002, installment, but please forgive my error in misspelling the FBI agent's name as "Rowly" rather than "Crowly.

²·Remember the outrage against those who initially suspected Middle-Eastern terrorism for the Oklahoma bombing by McVey?

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