WASHINGTON, 26 July 2004 — Former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke on Saturday faulted the Sept. 11 commission’s findings as soft and uncritical and said its proposed changes would have had little effect on the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
“Among the obvious truths that were documented but unarticulated were the facts that the Bush administration did little on terrorism before Sept. 11, and that by invading Iraq the administration has left us less safe as a nation,” Clarke wrote in an article in yesterday’s New York Times.
“Because the commission had a goal of creating a unanimous report from a bipartisan group, it softened the edges and left it to the public to draw many conclusions,” said Clarke, who in a book published in March said President George W. Bush’s administration never considered terrorism a truly urgent issue before Sept. 11, 2001.
Two of the commission’s key recommendations — creation of a Cabinet-level intelligence director to oversee all intelligence agencies, and a national counterterrorism center — “are good ideas,” said Clarke.
But they would only “marginally improve our ability to crush the new, decentralized Al-Qaeda.”
“We need not only a more powerful person at the top of the intelligence community, but also more capable people throughout the agencies — especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency,” he said.
More important, said Clarke, was the need to win “hearts and minds” in the Islamic world. “Unfortunately, because of America’s low standing in the Islamic world, we are now at a great disadvantage in the battle of ideas,” he said.
“This is primarily because of the unnecessary and counterproductive invasion of Iraq. In pulling its bipartisan punches, the commission failed to admit the obvious: We are less capable of defeating the jihadis because of the Iraq war.”
