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Richard Clarke on What Can be Done in Four Years
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Wednesday, Aug 31 2005, 8:28AM
The Washington Post's Walter Pincus joined us yesterday for a lunch that the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation hosted with Richard Clarke and wrote this article which appears today.
Clarke made some excellent points -- but among those not covered in the Pincus article was that "four years is a long time."
Clarke said:
As we approach the 4th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we need to take stock of what we have done that has worked, and not, in our struggle against terrorism. . .Four years is a long time.In four years, America fought and beat Nazi Germany while simultaneously fighting Imperial Japan -- and at the same time built the nuclear bomb and had the Manhattan Project.
A lot can be done in four years. On the plus side in the last four years, we have liberated Afghanistan. But then the record gets mixed.
Here is an excerpt from the Pincus article which mentions our forthcoming conference:
Richard A. Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism in the White House under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said yesterday that there were twice as many attacks outside Iraq in the three years after the 2001 attacks as in the three preceding years.Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda group "are no longer the traditional leaders as they were in the 1990s," Clarke said, adding that the terrorist leader had been building ideological groups from Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001, and that they had grown in the past few years into 14 to 16 separate networks.
Clarke said that bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, exercise "symbolic control and provide broad-brush themes" and that most of the networks operate independently, but "there are some signs of cooperation among some."
Clarke, now a corporate security and counterterrorism consultant, delivered his assessment of al Qaeda and the jihadist threat at a news conference at the New America Foundation designed to focus attention on a bipartisan, two-day policy forum set for next week in Washington, titled "Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose."
Clarke left the Bush administration in 2003 and has since alleged the Bush White House reacted slowly to warnings of terrorist attacks in early 2001.
Yesterday, Clarke said that Iraq is drawing a relatively small number of foreign fighters who train there and return home, but "it is unclear to what extent they are drawn by the U.S. presence or how much the U.S. is a magnet." Overall, he said that "there are more people participating [in jihadist networks] outside Iraq because of the U.S. presence" in that country.
-- Steve Clemons
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"In four years, America fought and beat Nazi Germany while simultaneously fighting Imperial Japan....."
I have begun to think, Steve, that this vanquisher of fabled foes must have been some other country.
Neither the clarity of purpose nor the multi-tasking competencies of that earlier country seem evident in the nation we now inhabit.
Re-discovering these lost dimensions is a task too large for our present leaderhship..... and a considerable challenge for those from the opposition party who seek to assume the reins of leadership.
We have a great deal of hard work ahead of us if we are to bring America 2005 back to the level of America 1942.
JOHN STUART
JOHNSTUART
steve - any chance we could get a transcript of clarkes presentation? thanks...
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 30, 9:28 PM ET
Bush said the Iraqi oil industry, already suffering from sabotage and lost revenues, must not fall under the control of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida forces in Iraq led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. "They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition."
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Is Bush stark raving mad? Bin Laden is going to take over the oil fields, maintain control, operation and repair and get the oil pumped to tankers? He's going to find buyers for it, then he's going to use those proceeds to further terrorize the U.S.? WTF! How in the hell is Bush not challenged on this lunacy? Steve, call somebody......................
For folks who like to frame the terrorism problem by putting it and 'war' in scare quotes is that they forget this struggle/war transcends any one party, and certainly any one presidency, whatever one thinks of the White House's political abuse of the war and their botched management of it.
I'm with Nudnik on this, and as he pointed out in another prescient comment some days ago (and I paraphrase) "if the US was able to occupy Germany for 60 years why shouldn't the US occupy Iraq for 60 years," which cogent comparison, I might add, makes sense, and is completely historical.
I also want to add my support to Nudnik's call for Israel's complete and unequivocal withdrawl back to the 1967 borders of the West Bank as the only way for peace between Arabs and Israel that will go a very long way to making our Global Struggle Against Violent Extremists much shorter than the 50 year Cold War.
What is interesting is his comment that Iraq is starting to be a training ground for terrorism. I'm not surprised this is happening, but its trend we are seeing worldwide.
A really interesting article which foresaw this new wave of terrorism can be found in the Autumn 2003 International Institute of Strategic Studies journal Survival titled: “Pablo to Osama:Counter-Terrorism Lessons from the War on Drugs.” Michael Kenny predicted that "decapitation" (or even suppression) of Pablo Escobar's empire made it far harder for the war on drugs to root out the drug processing capabilities in the long run as mid level managers would decentralize operations. This would make it even harder to eradicate the drug problem as these cells were very much self sufficient and self-replicating.
A few weeks ago a information leak in London dealing with the inquest into Shooting death of a Brazilian electrician who was wrongly suspected to be a Suicide bomber unearthed some very interesting information about the British Suicide bombers. It appears most of them were trained in a Terrorist "camp" in the Welsh hills. Realistically, anywhere can be a terrorist training camp, even one of the longest serving democracies in the world. However what the US must avoid at all costs is allowing for a centralized based for terrorist operations like Afghanistan to be created, especially in the Sunni triangle of Iraq.
This is very much the problem today. I'll go one further than Clarke, I'll say that there is no input from Bin Laden or any of the leadership cadre. Regular control would enable intelligence organizations to track and trace them. Rather it is the trainees, who learned their terrorist craft in the Camps of Sudan and Afghanistan who are now practicing terrorism on their own in a decentralized fashion very similar to the ways practiced by the drug trade in Colombia..
What is the upshot of this situation? Realistically I doubt that the US is under threat of a terrorist attack. See the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Millennium Bombers had to be funded and recruited from the outside the US, because there isn't a radical base where these groups can find support. Secondly I personally think, that the "WMD" issue is a bit of a nonstarter, EVEN if senators would like to say so. How these terrorist groups socialize and operate make it difficult for them to acquire the capabilities and technical knowledge to carry out these attacks, especially if they do not possess a centralized base to manage such a large process.
What we will see though is an intensification of the current trend of terrorist hotspots around the world, where radicalized populations will be used as mini sanctuaries to train and launch terrorist attacks.
Just a reminder... America did not beat Nazi Germany by itself. There wasn't just one country fighting Nazi Germany and I'd appreciate the truth being spoken, please.
Deb
What deb you don't mean the turning point of the war in Europe wasn't the 1944 Normandy invasion??!?!?!
The "War on Terror" is like the Cold War? Jesus Christ on a fucking crutch, will you just listen to yourself for a second? This is the stupidest goddamn thing I have ever heard. Can we just lay out a few obvious facts here? 9-11 was the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world. It was an appalling moment that is burned into my brain forever, but it was not much more than a pinprick on the hide of this monstrous machine that we call our civilization. Nor will any further terrorist attack do worse, even if the jihadists lay their hands on suitcase nukes or whatever. The Islamist jihadists cannot do anything more than annoy us. Western Civilization is not in danger.
People who are trying to make terrorism the organizing principle of the next half-century of human history are basically just fascistic scum promoting their Washington careers at the expense of democracy.
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