Long before 9/11, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda. By the time they decided, it was too late. The saga of a lost chance.
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In Washington, Dick Clarke didn't seem to have a lot of friends either. His proposals were still grinding away. No other great power handles the transition from one government to another in so shambolic a way as the U.S.new appointments take months to be confirmed by the Senate; incoming Administrations tinker with even the most sensible of existing policies.
The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear.
As the new Administration took office,
Rice kept
Clarke in his job as
counterterrorism czar. In
early February, he
repeated to Vice President Dick Cheney the briefing he had given to Rice and Hadley. There are differing opinions on
how seriously the Bush team took Clarke's warnings. Some members of the
outgoing Administration got the
sense that
the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become
obsessed with terrorism. "It was clear," says one, "that this was
not the same priority
to them that it was
to us."
For
other observers, however, the real point was
not that the new Administration dismissed the terrorist theat. On the contrary, Rice, Hadley and Cheney, says an official, "all got that it was important."
The question is, How high a priority did terrorism get? Clarke says that dealing with al-Qaeda "was in the top tier of issues reviewed by the Bush Administration."
But other topics got far more attention. The whole Bush national-security team was obsessed with setting up a national $y$tem of mi$$ile defen$e. (MY empha$i$!)
Some counterterrorism officials think there is
another reason for the
Bush Administration's dilatory response.
Clarke's paper, says an official,
"was a Clinton proposal." Keeping
Clarke around was
one thing; buying
into the analysis of
an Administration that the
Bush team considered
feckless and
naive was quite
another. So
Rice instructed Clarke to initiate a
new "policy review process" on the
terrorism threat.
Clarke dived into
yet another round of meetings.
And his proposals were nibbled nearly to death."
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