Wag this

[avram]

Richard Clarke is fighting back against the Bushies’ smear campaign:

"If Condi Rice had been doing her job and holding those daily meetings the way Sandy Berger did, if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser when she had information that there was a threat against the United States ... [the information] would have been shaken out in the summer of 2001," he told King.

And this is something I’ve been wanting to hear for a while:

"The Clinton administration failed to bomb the [al Qaeda] camps that were in Afghanistan, that we knew were there," Clarke said. "Clinton bombed them once. The public reaction was negative to that. ... Everyone said Clinton's just bombing Afghanistan to divert attention from the Monica [Lewinsky] business, and so he didn't bomb them again.

"That was during a time when they were turning out thousands of trained terrorists. It was an assembly line."

I want that printed out and stapled to the forehead of everyone who ever claimed Clinton was “wagging the dog” when he had that attack launched against bin Laden.

Comments

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

It would be a stronger suggestion to me if it hadn't worked for Clinton to change the conversation. "Sure, the timing is my 'problem', heh, heh".

I wasn't 100% convinced it was wag the dog before, and I'm less sure now, but I'd still bet it was a factor.