Clarke on pre-emption

An editorial in today's Toronto Globe & Mail brings a good helping of common sense and reason to the Richard Clarke & September 11 debate. To those who are now praising Mr. Clarke, they point out the inconvenient little fact that the strategy that Mr. Clarke is championing is "pre-emption".

The editorial also tackles Clarke's criticism of the decision to attack Iraq. Clarke believes this was a mistake, but the Globe & Mail illustrates the other inconvenient fact that

surely the lesson of Sept. 11 is that you can't wait. The Clinton administration failed to act forcefully against al-Qaeda because it had no solid proof of an impending attack. The proof came in a burst of flame over Lower Manhattan. The Bush administration decided it could not risk another event like that. It had to take the fight to the enemy. Some of his advisers said he should go after Mr. Hussein right away, but Mr. Bush went to Afghanistan first and waited till March of 2003, a year and a half after Sept. 11, to take on Iraq.

Even if Mr. Clarke disagreed with that decision, in a sense Mr. Bush was only doing what he advised: acting pre-emptively against a gathering threat.

This is why I have such a problem with these public hearings. As much as I sympathize with the families of those who died on September 11, these hearings are not about discovering who didn't do what so that the families have someone they can blame (when really, only Osama bin Laden and his underlings can be truly blamed).

The whole point of these hearings is to learn, so that we can be better prepared next time. We need to know what offensive and defensive strategies we can employ that will lessen the likelihood that we'll have another attack of similar scale or worse.

All this politicking is just garbage. It's unseemly, unhelpful and un-patriotic.

Neither administration did all it could to prevent September 11, but they did do all that they considered reasonable given what intelligence, etc. they had. Could the attacks have been prevented? Yes. Could the hijackers have been prevented from entering the country? Yes. Could airport and airline security have been better? Yes. Could the military have invaded Afghanistan & dismantled the terrorist training camps before September 11? Yes.

These things didn't happen for many reasons. We were caught off guard. It should not have happened, but more importantly, it cannot be allowed to happen again.