Hitch Deconstructs Clarke

Christopher Hitchens eviscerates Richard Clarke's posturing in a new dispatch. It's further proof that the Clarke controversy is being investigated almost solely by opinion writers and the conservative press. Hitchens's conclusion:

"To listen to Clarke now, you could almost imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan and eviction of the Taliban—the actual first response of the administration to Sept. 11—had not taken place. To listen to Clarke, also, you would suppose that any Iraqi connection to terrorism was sucked straight out of Rumsfeld's or Wolfowitz's thumb. One theory that does collapse completely is that of administration foreknowledge—the Bush people were evidently in no shape to take any quick advantage of the events and seemingly hadn't bothered to plant even one Iraqi among the mainly Saudi hijackers. But in my experience, dud theories die only to be replaced by new and even dumber ones. The current reigning favorite is that fighting al-Qaida in Iraq is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida."

A key problem for the anti-war, go-soft-on-terrorism crowd is that the only alternative policy they can offer is the Clinton strategy (which they designed), which was utterly ineffective at preventing a major disaster. Hence their need for a revisionist history of that administration's response to terrorism, for which they have little evidence but large imaginations. They want to oppose Bush's foreign policy, but they must avoid coming across as limousine liberals who want to see America's stature reduced lest we ruin the world. So they're attacking the prosecution of the war on terror as insufficient, although they've offered no alternative vision for making America safe from future terrorism. This is a tough row for any party to hoe, even with the help of an embarrassingly compliant media.