From an April 2, 2000 Washington Post profile of Richard Clarke:"We should have a very low barrier in terms of acting when there is a threat of weapons of mass destruction being used against American citizens," says Clarke, brushing aside suggestions that a preoccupation with bin Laden has caused errors in judgment, such as the decision to retaliate for the attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 by bombing a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, suspected of producing chemical agents. "We should not have a barrier of evidence that can be used in a court of law," Clarke says.
He compares the current threat of global terrorism with the situation faced by Western democracies in the period leading up to World War II, when appeasement carried the day. Imagine what would have happened, he says, had Winston Churchill come to power in Britain five years earlier and "aggressively gone after" Nazi Germany. Hitler would have been stopped, but in all likelihood, Clarke says, Churchill would have gone down in history "as a hawk, as someone who exaggerated the threat, who saber-rattled and did needless things."
In other words, people would say about Churchill pretty much what Clarke is saying about Bush right now... too bad Bush believed in a "low barrier" about WMD and did not use "a barrier of evidence that can be used in a court of law."
More on Clarke from that April 2, 2000 Washington Post article: "After the bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment buildings used by U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia in June 1996, associates say, Clarke prepared a memo for Clinton arguing that Iran was behind the attack. Much to his annoyance, then-national security adviser Anthony Lake quashed the memo on the grounds that the case against Iran was circumstantial at best. (Evidence subsequently provided by the Saudis has convinced many U.S. intelligence officials that Clarke's instincts were right.)"...As the millennium countdown continued, the Clarke team moved its operations to the Y2K Center at 1800 G St. NW, where they set up a secure communications facility. Most of the team was dressed informally, but Clarke wore a tuxedo. Shortly after midnight, he received a congratulatory phone call from Sandy Berger, who was at the Lincoln Memorial with Clinton. "It's still too early to celebrate," Clarke told Berger, referring to fears that the terrorist cell linked to an Algerian arrested near Seattle in mid-December, Ahmed Ressam, might still be planning an attack on the West Coast.
It was too early to celebrate in a larger sense as well. "It's not enough to be in a cat-and-mouse game, warning about his plots," Clarke says, referring to bin Laden. "If we keep that up, we will someday fail. We need to seriously think about doing more. Our goal should be to so erode his network of organizations that they no longer pose a serious threat.""
So it sounds like Clarke was saying the right things back in the '90s and before 9/11. But today he seems to have no recognition of what the world, or domestic political reaction would be, had Bush attempted to "erode bin Laden's network" by invading Afghanistan in early 2001. The anti-war movement we see today would be defending the Taliban as victims of unilateral, preemptive, American imperialism. U.S. troops would still be in Saudi Arabia, Saddam would still be in power, and much of the world would believe America was attacking Osama "for no good reason", based on a vague threat of future attacks that could never be verified.
Hey, did Leslie Stahl ask Clarke if he still thinks Iran was behind the Khobar Towers attack? If they were, would that justify... "post-emptive" U.S. retaliatory strikes against Tehran?