HITCHYPOO ON CLARKE
(emphasis on "poo")

Another Hitchens column, another batch of nonsense, this time on Iraq, Clarke, al Qaeda and more.

Among those claiming to be vindicated by [Clarke's] testimony are Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two senior counterterrorism figures from the Clinton National Security Council, whose not-bad book The Age of Sacred Terror, published in 2002, bears re-reading. Among other things, it contains (on Pages 230-233 and 336-338 of the paperback version) an interesting profile of Richard Clarke, who is depicted as an egotistical pain in the ass who had the merit of getting things right. This seems fair: He has been exposed as wildly wrong in saying that Condoleezza Rice had never even heard of al-Qaida?an allegation that almost amounts to the dread charge of "character assassination"?and his operatic bow to the families of the victims is fine unless you think (as don't we all?) that one shouldn't appear to exploit Sept. 11 for partisan purposes.

That's fine, except that Clarke never said Condi Rice hadn't heard of al Qaeda, only that he got that impression from her response when he mentioned the terrorist organization in January of '01. Opinions can't be proven false.

Furthermore, it is entirely possible to believe that a person whose job it was to be the head of counterterrorism for a country can apologize to those affected by a terrorist attack within a country without it being an exploitation of the attack for partisan purposes. Particularly since Clarke is an independent who has voted for both Republicans and Democrats. So at the very least, "partisan" is the wrong word, Chris.

Then we get the "Iraq was behind the Sudanese chemical plant that Clinton bombed" stuff.

how do you explain the conviction, shared by Clarke and Benjamin and Simon, that Iraq was behind Bin Laden's deadly operation in Sudan? The Age of Sacred Terror justifies the Clinton strike on Khartoum on the grounds that "Iraqi weapons-scientists" were linked to Bin Laden's factory and that the suggestive chemical EMPTA, detected at the site, was used only by Iraq to make VX nerve gas. At the time, Clarke defended the bombing in almost the same words, telling the press that he was "sure" that "intelligence existed linking bin Laden to Al Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan." The U.N. arms inspector upon whom all three relied at the time, for corroborating evidence implicating Saddam, was a man who has since become famous: David Kay.

This is a problematic argument for Bush-supporters to make, because they've spent so much breath on how it was merely a pharmaceutical plant that we attacked in '98. Furthermore, in all of Bush/Cheney/Rummy/Powell/etc's attempts to link Saddam to al Qaeda, we didn't hear about this, did we? Given how fast and loose the administration has been with the facts on WMD and al Qaeda links, don't you think they would have jumped on this if they thought there was any merit? I admit, I don't have the referenced book in front of me (and Hitch could be cherry-picking here), but since the greater conclusion out of all of this is that there wasn't much of anything at all going at the pharma plant in Khartoum, so at the end of the day this was another Iraq link that fizzled out. Clarke knows that now, so he's a hell of a lot more reluctant than, say, Wolfowitz, to go for these Mylroie-ian nutbar theories. Nothing here contradicts Clarke's saying to Wolfowitz that there hasn't been Iraqi terrorism directed against the United States since essentially right after the Gulf War.

And the reference to David Kay, who ain't found shiyit, says something.

Of course, in order to make these assertions, Hitch has to disclose the obvious (which he should get some credit for doing):

I should say that I am criticized by name in the Benjamin-Simon book for a series of anti-Clinton articles that I wrote at the time of the Al-Shifa raid. Even if the factory was not an aspirin-producing pharmaceutical plant, there seemed no justification for bombing it without warning and without even notifying Congress, let alone the United Nations. Talk about pre-emptive and unilateral.

After his disclosure, he returns to his regularly scheduled stupidity, already in progress. All together now: A unilarteral cruise missile strike is a lot different from a unilateralist invasion involving hundreds of thousands of American troops. Later:

To listen to Clarke now, you could almost imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan and eviction of the Taliban?the actual first response of the administration to Sept. 11?had not taken place. To listen to Clarke, also, you would suppose that any Iraqi connection to terrorism was sucked straight out of Rumsfeld's or Wolfowitz's thumb.

To actually read Clarke's book now, you'd notice that he references Afghanistan all over the place, and devotes a significant portion of the chapter on that time period to it. Not that the chapter is called "Right War, Wrong War", guess which one he thought was "right"? And again, the administration did not make an argument connecting Iraq and al Qaeda that was within a thousand miles of what Hitchypoo has here (although I would add Chalabi's thumb to that list, but that's another issue). After babbling about a conspiracy theory or two that Clarke hasn't mentioned, he finishes with:

But in my experience, dud theories die only to be replaced by new and even dumber ones. The current reigning favorite is that fighting al-Qaida in Iraq is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.

Oy. Nobody is saying that, Chris. Al-Qaida's presence in Iraq appears to have come into being after we invaded and threw the country into its post-toppling semi-chaotic state. We have to do our damndest to make sure that Iraq is in good shape when the time comes that we leave. It was invading Iraq in the first place that distracted us from the fight against al-Qaeda. And not only that, we've inspired a whole new multitude of recruits to join al-Qa--- actually screw this, is 4:30 too early for a drink?