Sidebar To A Sidebar

Doc Drezner links to a fascinating back and forth between Matt Yglesias of TAPPED and Rich Lowry of NRO on the question of how well President Clinton fought the war on terror.

Read it all!

And the sidebar, from this by Mr. Yglesias:

Nevertheless, because Lowry wants to play the culpability game, let me suggest that an accusation of weakness on terrorism can be more plausibly pointed at the pre-9-11 Bush administration than at Clinton's. By all indications, Bush, upon entering office, actually reduced the priority given to fighting terrorism from a level that was, in retrospect, already inadequate. According to Time, Clinton officials developed, in the waning days of their administration, a plan for combating al-Qaeda more vigorously, but -- wanting to avoid sticking the incoming administration with a policy it had not designed -- they delayed implementing the plan and instead passed the matter on to the incoming national-security team.

Uhh, lefty myth, sorry. Would you believe me if I cited the Man Without Shakespeare, whose title for this post I will carry with me forever? Oh, then how about Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler (scroll down a bit), who good-naturedly notes the Sandy Berger recantation.

Comments

[Jon Henke]

I'd blogged on the topic about a week ago, or so, when Clinton mentioned that he'd talked to Bush about OBL.

Along with Bergers denial that it was actually a "plan", let me add another witness who claimed that "the military recommended against it. There was a high probability that it wouldn't succeed."

...and Bill Clinton would have known.

Reality is that both Presidents did what limited bit they could in a pre-9/11 world. And we're judging them in a post-9/11 world, forgetting that the rules were different back then.

[Swopa]

If you really want to make this seem like a "lefty myth," you should probably remove the link to the TIME piece, which explains in extreme detail the presentation that was made by Richard Clarke (indeed, the reporters seem to have been given a copy of the actual PowerPoint document):

Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."

I've highlighted the complicity of Bush officials in spreading the "lefty myth" by acknowledging that Clarke's presentation happened. I'll also add this, from what TM calls Sandy Berger's "recantation" (in the Howler link):

We briefed them fully on what we were doing — on what else was under consideration and what the threat was. I personally attended part of that briefing to emphasize how important that was.

To split hairs over whether this constituted a formal "plan" seems to muddle the debate, rather than clarifying it. Hopefully, the diversion isn't an intentional one.

[TM]

There are a lot of links to follow. This one may be useful:

"Flatly contradicting Time magazine's claims this week that his administration turned over workable plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden to the Bush White House, ex-President Bill Clinton confessed earlier this year that his administration's plans had a "high probability" of failure.

Clinton made the stunning admission during a February address to a New York business group, which, apparently, Time declined to cover."

http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2002/8/7/170607

[Swopa]

Okay, so I guess the diversion was intentional. :-)

[TM]

Swopa, we seem to be back to the question of whether I am lying or you are just willfully unable to follow an argument. According to TIME:

"The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House's point man on terrorism. ...The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. "

From that passage, I infer that Clarke made the same presentation to Berger that he made in early January to Rice. So far so good? Or do you have evidence that, over the week of Christmas and New Year's, the Clarke briefing underwent substantial changes? We eagerly await the news.

Now, here is Berger talking to Congress:

"We briefed them fully on what we were doing—on what else was under consideration and what the threat was. I personally attended part of that briefing to emphasize how important that was. But **there was no war plan that we turned over to the Bush administration during the transition. And the reports of that are just incorrect.**"

Since Berger was National Security Adviser and had been fully briefed on the Clarke "plan", I am inclined to believe his testimony to Congress that it was not a "war plan".

Now, why don't you write a suitably snarky post explaining that Bob Somerby is wrong, the transcript is wrong, I am lying, and TIME is right.

My guess as to what happened - Clark had twenty five flip charts titled "Osama is Evil and Dangerous". He laid out a lot of things that could be done about it. But no one, other than at the Dec. 20 Berger meeting, had actually seen it, thought about how to implement it, or done anything at all with it. My guess is that no one at State or Defense had actually begun grinding through any details at all about troops, logistics, basing, or anything else.

So, it may be that, as you point out, "the reporters seem to have been given a copy of the actual PowerPoint document". So what? A reporter looking at the presentation, with no idea what else had or had not happened, might very well think it was a comprehensive plan. Berger, however, did not, when asked in hte suitable forum. Rice did not.

In fact, TIME sems to vaguely understand this in its own story:

"The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then **spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy** before they were readied for approval by President Bush."

So, Clarke and Berger had not taken this to the point where anyone was ready to go as of early January.

Now, I quote Matt Yglesias saying:

"[the Clinton team] delayed **implementing** the plan and instead passed the matter on to the incoming national-security team."

The idea that they had a plan to implement does not seem to be substantiated.

Now, I just wasted twenty minutes on that. Deleting your comments that seem to be informed by nothing more than a belief that I am a liar would take about ten seconds. I am going tomake a different time-management decision the next time this happens (which is roughly what I said the last time... am I channelling Kofi Anan?)

[Jon Henke]

Good work, Tom. You put the information together well.

Another point I'd add.....the substantive information on Al Qaeda/OBL, we knew of since 1998. And yet, between 98-2001, we didn't act, despite being attacked on a number of occassions by the group. Why?

And, if there was a good cause for inaction (which I believe)why should we have suddenly begun to act (suprise!) between the period of (oh, let's just say) January 20th, 2001 and September 11th, 2001.

I mean, what changed?

Oh.

[TM]

Well, thank you, Jon.

And yes, there is a distinct "sports-talk radio" quality to the discussion - Grady Little should have taken Pedro out,Bush should have taken Osama out, now we know.

I think my fave line in the TIME article is this:

"...often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it."

Or, "Even we failed to realize this was a big deal at the time!"

[Swopa]

TM,

I wrote, after describing Clarke's presentation on al-Qaeda, "To split hairs over whether this constituted a formal 'plan' seems to muddle the debate, rather than clarifying it."

You then devote two posts, one quite lengthy and aggrieved, to saying, "But it wasn't a PLAN!" Forgive me for suggesting that you might be the one who's not following the argument here.

The substantive issue here, for both the Clinton and Bush administrations, is whether the al-Qaeda threat was recognized & steps were taken to respond to it. (And I agree with you about the talk-radio hindsight quality of the discussion, but Yglesias says the same thing -- it's Lowry who has written & is flogging a book trying to assign blame on a partisan basis.) The question as to whether those steps reached the point of being a "plan" as of an arbitrary date strikes me as largely semantic, and a diversion from whether or not progress continued to be made.

Perhaps a sports analogy will help. In the two months between the USS Cole attack and Dec. 20th, the Clinton administration (specifically, Richard Clarke) moved the anti-AQ "ball" to the point of having his PowerPoint proposals, however you want to characterize them. Then Bush et al. took over as quarterback. Harping on whether or not it was "first and goal" at that point obscures the fact that Clarke had clearly moved the ball forward, and the substantive question of whether the Bush team continued to move it forward from whatever field posiition they inherited.

Your substantive response seems to be this: the ball was sufficiently far from the the end zone that the Bush-led team needed at least eight months to "grind through details about troops, logistics, basing," etc. Which is at least a plausible hypothesis. But is there any evidence that they actually did that during those eight months, rather than pulling Clarke's presentation off the shelf on Sept. 11th and beginning a crash implementation effort then?

[Swopa]

"Flatly contradicting Time magazine's claims this week that his administration turned over workable plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden to the Bush White House, ex-President Bill Clinton confessed earlier this year that his administration's plans had a "high probability" of failure.

Clinton made the stunning admission during a February address to a New York business group, which, apparently, Time declined to cover."

Maybe you can help me here, TM. I just looked through the Time article, and I can't find where it "claims" the Clinton administration "turned over workable plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden to the Bush White House." What I did find was this:

On Nov. 7, Berger met with William Cohen, then Secretary of Defense, in the Pentagon. . . . He wanted "boots on the ground"-U.S. special-ops forces deployed inside Afghanistan on a search-and-destroy mission targeting bin Laden. Cohen said he would look at the idea, but he and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were dead set against it. They feared a repeat of Desert One, the 1980 fiasco in which special-ops commandos crashed in Iran during an abortive mission to rescue American hostages.

This jibes exactly with Clinton's remarks in the NewsMax piece, where he says that a get-bin-Laden mission would have been logistically difficult and was opposed by the military.

Nice "scoop" there, NewsMax! Maybe next they can debunk Tom Maguire's claims that the Red Sox are the best team in baseball.

[TM]

Matt Yglesias:

Clinton officials developed, in the waning days of their administration, a plan for combating al-Qaeda more vigorously, but -- wanting to avoid sticking the incoming administration with a policy it had not designed -- they delayed implementing the plan and instead passed the matter on to the incoming national-security team.

Me - lefty myth, there was no plan, as Sandy Berger later admitted.

Swopa - Well, saying it is a lefty myth is an apparent diversion, and anyway, debating whether it was a plan or not just muddles us up.

Thanks for stopping by, Swopa. Copy anything you find interesting or helpful - later tonight, a lot of it is disappearing.

[Paul Zrimsek]

"Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept ... and later turn it into an idea." -- Sandy Be^H^H^H^HWoody Allen, Annie Hall

[Swopa]

As I've said, you keep getting hung up on the semantic issue, without addressing the substantive one.

Is your only point that Yglesias should have said "unfinished proposals" (or some other phrase) rather than "plan" in the paragraph you quote? Couldn't you just stipulate that and move on to discuss the actual issue regarding al Qaeda?

Incidentally, I daresay that deleting all or part of this thread would violate many people's sense of proper blogging ethics.

[TM]

Sidebar: A short, often boxed auxiliary news story that is printed alongside a longer article and that typically presents additional, contrasting, or late-breaking news.

But which is not central to the story.
Is that a helpful hint as to why I continue to think this is a waste of time? My entire point was that the TIME story was wrong, not that Yglesias's argument collapsed, that Bush was a hero, or anything else.

And I am deeply appreciative of your advice on ethics. When you have thoughts on either reading comprehension or manners, pass those along as well.

Save anything yop are especially proud of, and start working on your aggrieved post. You're a victim! Another close minded righty shut his ears to the truth.

[Swopa]

My entire point was that the TIME story was wrong . . .

Then it seems like my excerpt of the TIME article, which shows exactly what was presented to the Bush administration (and acknowledges a denial that it constituted "a formal plan") is quite appropriate and on topic.

As is my demonstration that the NewsMax story entirely misrepresents the TIME article.

I think you'd be better off addressing those subjects, rather than sniping at me personally.

[HH]

I think Berger's flat statement that TIME's reporting is inaccurate presents certain, er, problems with relying on TIME to respond to Berger.