[theknife]

all this fuss about Clarke obscures a central point of his testimony: the invasion of Iraq is not helping the war on terrorism.

Clarke's Critique Reopens Debate on Iraq War

Administration Strongly Resists View That Invasion Undermined War on Terrorism
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A22

John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 commission, put it bluntly to former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke when he testified publicly last week: Why did his earlier, private testimony to the commission not include the harsh criticism leveled at President Bush in his book?

"There's a very good reason for that," Clarke replied. "In the 15 hours of testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq. And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

all the attacks on his character (which is pretty decent by most accounts) and motives (which undoubtedly include book publicity) don't change the validity of these assertions.

White House officials strongly dispute Clarke's conclusion, saying it reflects an old-fashioned approach to dealing with terrorism. "Those who question Iraq have an outdated and one-dimensional view of what is really a multi-dimensional threat to our nation," said Jim Wilkinson, deputy national security adviser for communications. "Some think the solution is to kill Osama bin Laden, finish Afghanistan and then go back to a defensive posture and hope we're not attacked again. This approach represents the old way of thinking because it ignores the fact that the modern terrorist threat is a global threat."

But Clarke's complaint resonates with some other former administration officials. Rand Beers, who served as counterterrorism chief after Clarke, has voiced the same complaint and is now foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry (Mass.). Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst and Middle East specialist who left Bush's National Security Council staff a year ago, also agrees.

"Clarke's critique of administration decision-making and how it did not balance the imperative of finishing the job against al Qaeda versus what they wanted to do in Iraq is absolutely on the money," Leverett said.

He said that Arabic-speaking Special Forces officers and CIA officers who were doing a good job tracking Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and other al Qaeda leaders were pulled out of Afghanistan in March 2002 to begin preparing for Iraq. "We took the people out who could have caught them," he said. "But even if we get bin Laden or Zawahiri now, it is two years too late. Al Qaeda is a very different organization now. It has had time to adapt. The administration should have finished this job."

Jessica Stern, Harvard University lecturer and author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill," concurs. "It was a distraction on the war on terrorism and made it more difficult to prosecute because the al Qaeda movement used the war in Iraq to mobilize new recruits and energize the movement," she said. "And we apparently sent Special Forces from Afghanistan, where they should have been fighting al Qaeda, to Iraq."

But Eliot Cohen, director of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and an advocate of attacking Iraq, argues that Clarke's analysis wrongly assumes the battle against terrorism paralyzes the government when it comes to other wars. He said that if one assumes the fight against terrorism is a multi-year effort that could stretch decades, then "there is nothing the U.S. government can do for 30 years but fight al Qaeda." He noted that the bulk of the fighting in Iraq was carried out by military units, such as the 101st Airborne, that were not involved in Afghanistan.

Cohen agreed, however, that a war the scale of the Iraq invasion could divert the attention of senior officials from other issues, such as fighting terrorism. Pat Lang, who was head of Middle East and South Asia intelligence in the Defense Intelligence Agency for seven years, said: "When you commit as much time and attention and resources as we did to Iraq, which I do not believe is connected to the worldwide war against the jihadis, then you subtract what you could commit to the war on terrorism. You see that especially in the Special Forces commitment, as we have only so many of them."

Wilkinson countered that, under Bush's strategy, "we're taking territory and resources away from the terrorists across many fronts, from liberating Iraq and Afghanistan, to removing WMD from Libya, to seizing terrorist finances." He added that a recently discovered memo urging an Islamist battle against the U.S. occupation in Iraq, allegedly written by Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi to senior al Qaeda leaders, demonstrates "the terrorists understand what Iraq means to their survival."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Mar27.html