At 11:01 PM 4/12/2004 -0700 Doug Pensinger wrote: > What if he had held high level >meetings and prioritized anti-terror?
I'm going to address this point since it has now been raised by both you and Dan, among others.... I'm not sure that "high-level" meetings are a particular important component of the answer. As has been discussed here previously, this charge is largely a result of Clarke's allegations - and he, of course, has personal reasons for making this charge. He enjoyed unprecedented access under Clinton, who was a noted micro-manager, and thus reasonably might have been frustrated by a return to the usual chain-of-command under Bush. Rich Lowry, I think does a good job of presenting a counter-point to this emphasis on "high level meetings" in the most recent National Review. Among the most notable points he makes here is that when we talk about a meeting of "deputies", we are talking about people like Wolfowitz and Armitrage - not exactly lightweight junior staffers.... "At one level, Clarke has a purely bureaucratic complaint: that his ideas were considered by "the deputies," the officials just below the level of cabinet officers (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, et al.) rather than by "the principals" themselves (Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, et al.). This is considered a travesty by Clarke. In the Clinton administration, he had been given free rein by Sandy Berger, who had outsize power for a national security adviser, and Clarke himself was able to call meetings of the principals. Condoleezza Rice re-established regular order, in which the National Security Council and its staff wouldn't have such extraordinary clout. Influence flowed back to the traditional centers of power at Defense and State. So Clarke couldn't call a meeting of the principals to consider his ideas, as he desperately wanted. But the deputies met seven times between April and September 10 on the issue of terrorism. As Clarke himself admits, when the principals took up the proposed anti�al-Qaeda strategy on September 4, they quickly approved the plan. This was partly because the issues had already been worked thoroughly by the deputies � exactly the process that so outrages Clarke. Substantively, the Bush team took Clarke's ideas and made them marginally more aggressive. What had been a strategy that sought to "roll back" and "contain" al-Qaeda aimed to "eliminate" it instead. Clarke takes credit for this change, and he probably was the one to type the word "eliminate" into the strategy document, but the shift came from the top. Bush famously said in May that he was tired of "swatting flies," and Condi Rice, according to the 9/11 commission, wanted ideas that would mean "taking the offensive" against al-Qaeda." JDG _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
