Jewish World Review March 26, 2004/ 4 Nissan, 5764
Wesley Pruden
The public tantrum of a bureaucrat
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Maybe it's true that "hell hath no fury
like a woman scorned," but William
Congreve, the 17th-century playwright
who thought he had seen everything,
never met a Washington bureaucrat.
Richard A. Clarke, who was
employed by a succession of presidents
to offer advice on how to deal with
international terrorism, has entertained
Washington this week with his attempt
to get even with George W. Bush for
(a) not taking his advice, (b) not giving
him a job with a more-important
sounding title or (c) both.
Mr. Clarke's public tantrum follows
close on a similar fit of foaming
resentment by fellow author Paul
O'Neill, the secretary of the Treasury
who was summarily canned by
President Bush. The president offered
him nothing else but advice to get a
job. Mr. O'Neill's tenure at Treasury
was distinguished only by his outburst
on leaving, when he described the
president presiding over a typical
Cabinet meeting as "like a blind man in
a roomful of deaf people." The
meaningless description offered a clue
as to why Mr. O'Neill was dumped. A
president is entitled to expect his
Treasury chief to think and speak
clearly enough to make change from a
$10 bill.
Richard Clarke apparently brought a
similarly focused intelligence to his job,
and that he lasted so long testifies
mostly to the reluctance at the top of
the government to cashier bureaucrats
who have nothing much to offer but
goofiness and a familiar face.
Mr. Clarke, in his testimony to the
bipartisan committee investigating
security and intelligence lapses leading
to September 11, sharply scolded
President Bush for not preventing the
destruction of the World Trade Center
and the attack on the Pentagon, and
for not doing what he should be doing
to punish al Qaeda instead of
misadventuring into Iraq. But it's clear
that what really bugs Mr. Clarke is that
the president does not share Mr.
Clarke's estimation of the wit, the
erudition and the wisdom of Richard Clarke.
Mr. Clarke is, in a word, a geek. There's nothing wrong
with geekhood; geeks are crucial to making things work as
technology becomes ever more complicated and ever more
crucial to how we live our lives. But it's the single-mindedness
necessary to being a geek that makes geeks vulnerable to
tunnel vision.
"The retirement of Richard Clarke is appropriate to the
reality of the war on terror," says George Smith, a senior
fellow at Global Security.org, a defense and technology think
tank in Washington. "Years ago, Clarke bet his
national-security career on the idea that 'electronic war' was
going to be the real war. He lost, because as al Qaeda and
[the war in] Iraq have shown, the real action is still of the
blood and guts kind."
As Bill Clinton's terror guru, Mr. Clarke preached the
coming of the end of the world by cyberterror, foreseeing
doom not by the spread of anthrax or smallpox virus among
flesh and blood humans, but the spread of software viruses
that would change the template, if not the face, of modern
warfare. The old-fashioned violence of September 11,
delivering death by fire and desolation, suddenly made the
idea of stealing Saddam Hussein's e-mail or drowning his
regime in spam seem silly, indeed. The endless flood of spam
in behalf of Viagra, penis enlargement and breast
enhancement can make you want to kill somebody, but spam
is only potted scam, after all.
Mr. Clarke tried to persuade President Reagan to subvert
Moammar Gadhafi by dispatching SR-71 Blackbirds to
smother Libya in sonic booms, accompanied by sailing a fleet
of rafts across the Mediterranean to wash upon the shores of
Tripoli to frighten Gadhafi into thinking invasion was
imminent. All he left out of this cockamamie scenario was a
broadcast of the Marines Hymn (" ... from the halls of
Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli ... "). The scheme was
quietly buried, but Mr. Clarke, alas for later presidents and
national security, survived.
The New Republic reported that it was Mr. Clarke's idea to
retaliate for the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania by targeting Osama bin Laden's deserted training
camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan
that was making not chemicals for warfare, but aspirin. In the
days that followed, Bill Clinton could have used the aspirin.
Mr. Clarke, the cheri du jour of the elite media, complains
that George W. didn't listen to him. With his record of
accomplishment in a succession of administrations, the
scandal is not that he wasn't listened to but that somebody
persuaded George W. to keep him in the White House. Since
taking care of bureaucrats has become the first purpose of
government, maybe the president did owe him something.
Somebody should have sent him over to the motor pool to
detail the president's limousine.
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JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
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