Faith-Based Foreign Policy

March 21, 2004

Richard Clarke, a senior advisor on terrorism in both the Clinton and W. Bush Administrations tells the media how the Bush Administration completely ignored the threat of international terrorism before 9/11. CBS News: Did Bush Press For Iraq-9/11 Link?

Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda.

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism..."

"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

And Bush wants to run for reelection on his record regarding terrorism?

At TPM, Josh Marshall provides further analysis:

In short, they pushed al Qaida and a lot of resources aimed at fighting al Qaida to the backburner until the whole thing blew up in their faces on 9/11.

TPM, again: This is the essence of the whole story:

Rather than adjust to this different reality, on September 12th, the Bush war cabinet set about using 9/11 -- exploiting it, really -- to advance an agenda which had, in fact, been largely discredited by 9/11. They shoe-horned everything they'd been trying to do before the attacks into the new boots of 9/11. And the fit was so bad they had to deceive the public and themselves to do it.

Steve Gilliard: Better targets "the Bush response to 9/11 would have let Osama get away with murder, killing thousands of innocent people."