Richard Clarke
Sunday, April 25th, 2004Richard Clarke’s charges that the Bush administration ignored the growing threat of Al Quaeda – and ignored his own prescient warnings about that threat – in the months leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center became a cause celebre among those who wished fervently to believe both in the incompetence or venality of the President and his policies and in the capacity for government to keep us safe from such atrocities. If we only listened to smart and dedicated people like Richard Clarke (and his old boss, Bill Clinton) then we could have back our golden age.
That is certainly the story that was told by the news media. But notwithstanding subsequent revelations about Mr. Clarke’s apparent epiphany on the dangers of Islamic Fascism between his services on the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams, is it really reasonable to expect that a new President and a new administration – even if they have both a vision and a mandate – is going to turn around decades of policy thought and practice in their first nine months in office?