Clarke: More Reasons to Invade Iran Than Iraq
Tuesday, June 08, 2004 12:36 p.m. ET
VIENNA (Reuters) - It would have made more sense to invade Iran than Iraq, says a former U.S. counterterrorism adviser who has already accused the Bush administration of being soft on terrorism and wasting resources by attacking Iraq.
Richard Clarke, a former adviser to three U.S. presidents and four administrations, said mere possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) did not justify invading a country. This was the U.S. government's stated grounds for the Iraq war.
"If you take the case of Iran, its nuclear program is far more advanced than Iraq's was," Clarke told the Austrian daily Der Standard in an interview translated into German. "There would have been far more grounds to invade there (Iran)."
The United States believes Iran's nuclear program is a front for developing atomic weapons. Tehran denies this, saying its atomic ambitions are limited to generating electricity.
The U.S. military has found none of the caches of Iraqi WMD that Washington said Saddam Hussein had possessed in abundance.
In his recently published memoirs "Against All Enemies," Clarke charged that the administration of President Bush did not take the al Qaeda threat seriously enough before the September 11, 2001 attacks and needlessly attacked Iraq.
Clarke's accusations have damaged Bush's reputation for being tough on terrorism -- a key theme in the president's re-election campaign. The Los Angeles Times reported in April that 52 percent of Americans agreed that Bush had been lax on terrorism before September 11 while 40 percent disagreed.
Bush has repeatedly denied Clarke's charges.
In a chapter entitled "That Almost War, 1996," Clarke says former U.S. President Bill Clinton almost launched a war against Iran for what Washington says its support for terrorism against the United States.
However, Clarke says Clinton chose not to attack Iran but ordered an "intelligence operation" that seemed to have worked.
"Following the intelligence operation, and perhaps because of it and the serious U.S. threats, among other reasons, Iran ceased terrorism against the U.S.," Clarke wrote. "War with Iran was averted."
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"War with Iran was averted."
Who's he kidding?
Clinton would never have gone to war, anyway.
Did Clarke just say that we didn't need to go to war with Iraq because we needed to go to war with Iran, even though we no longer needed to go to war with Iran?
Anybody got a waffle translator handy? I am confused.