Just as the 9/11 commission is beginning its public hearings to figure out what went wrong with America's defense, Washington is again being diverted by one of its favorite pastimes: the blame game.
The latest round of partisan finger-pointing has been kicked off by former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who squarely accuses the Bush administration of failing to prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Democrats, eager to find a chink in the president's anti-terror armor, have embraced Clarke's charges as historical revelations. Republicans, circling the wagons around their commander in chief, have already tried to undermine Clarke's credibility by portraying him as a disgruntled ex-employee with impure motives.
In research for my latest book, I found Clarke to be one of the few heroes in the Bush White House. He was a career bureaucrat who served under four presidents and one of the first officials to recognize the seriousness of the threat posed by Al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalists. But it is disappointing to see Clarke pick on only one of the four administrations under which he served; after all, there were decades of American incompetence and inaction, and they all deserve a share of the blame.
Clarke, almost more than any other past or present federal official, should be aware of the failures of every Republican and Democratic administration since Ronald Reagan. Not a single president should boast of his work and commitment to fighting terrorism prior to 9/11.
When George W. Bush took office, he and his aides talked tougher than their Clinton counterparts but often seemed more preoccupied with ambitious military projects like missile defense than with chasing Al Qaeda. On Sept. 10, the day before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft submitted his first budget. He requested funding increases for 68 departments but rejected the FBI's requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism agents, 54 extra translators and 200 additional analysts.
That same day, Vice President Dick Cheney said he needed six months more to study a draft of homeland security legislation; he considered other matters more pressing.
