The president’s men

Athens, Greece

Here in Greece, the furies that condemn George Bush’s policies have reawakened demons barely dozing after decades of resentment. Those demons were frolicking even before US support for the Colonels’ coup of 1967, when America backed the Greek military dictatorship that ruled until 1974.

During the Clinton years, Greeks believed America sided with Muslims (Bosnia, Kosovo) against their orthodox Serbian co-religionists. But Clinton came to Athens and apologized for US support of the Colonels. Bush is no apologizer. To say he is disliked is an understatement. He is resented as a malevolent God – so much so as to distract from Greek’s own European problems.

Many of the Greek students, academics and journalists I’ve met both here and in Thessaloniki are still not ready to see that the Madrid massacre was a first-magnitude European event, one whose reverberations extend to nervously pre-Olympic Athens as well.

A good thing about getting out of America is you get to watch CNN International, which penetrates even the Souvlaki Curtain that divides Greece from the rest of Europe. In general, the CNN brand that circulates outside the US is vastly superior to the American version – the mélange of celebrity, sport, and health snippets shoveled out to American customers by anchors who smile idiotically as they look embarrassed by bad-news headlines. Far more often than the domestic brand, CNN International carries elaborate reports and extensive segments of revelatory material like the Milosevic trial in the Hague. No doubt CNN thinks this is way too, er, cosmopolitan – or shall we say foreign? – for its American audience.

So I was startled the other day, 28 March, by the following characterization by CNN International’s anchorwoman of the Democratic position on Bush’s stand-down vis-à-vis al-Qaida before 11 September, as charged in the new book and testimony by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke: The Democrats, she said, were attacking Bush for “not being aggressive enough” in countering bin Laden and his network.

Not being aggressive enough. Actually, the issue isn’t Bush’s quantity of aggressiveness. There’s no sign he’s ever been lacking on that score. The issue is one of judgment, acumen, intelligence. There’s also the not negligible matter of a ruler’s honesty, hence of a democracy’s ability to make informed judgments, hence of the workability of American democracy altogether.

The dishonesty is easiest to discern, though undecided voters will have to do the parsing on their own for a while yet. John Kerry has (for now) kept silence on Clarke, leaving the Bush squad to trip over its own feet – which may be politic. He’s left Clarke and top Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle to go after Bush directly. Public opinion seems to be dangling on a knife-edge, with half the country believing Bush, the other half, Clarke. But CNN reported their own poll (with USA Today) on 31 March: When asked, “Is the Bush administration covering up something about failures in intelligence before September 11?” 53% said yes, 41% said no.

Quivering public opinion absorbs the drip, drip, drip, that I wrote about in last week’s column, and it’s way too early to surmise with any confidence where the moisture level will end up.

Since Clarke went public with his charges that Bush utterly misunderstood the threat from al-Qaida and other stateless terrorists, the White House has changed its line with feverish, virtually daily oscillations. For example, the White House at first denied that there had been any meeting between Bush and Clarke just after the 11 September attacks, a meeting described in detail by Clarke. Then CBS News reported that they had two sources, one of them present at this discussion, confirming Clarke’s account. (I’m indebted, as so often, to Josh Marshall at www.talkingpointsmemo.com for noting this.) Whereupon the White House declared less than steadfastly: “We are not denying such a meeting took place. It probably did.”

“It probably did.” That’s the sort of squishy stuff the hard men and women in the White House dish out nowadays when they’re conceding a point. They’re grazing near the rhetorical cumbersomeness of Richard Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, who famously declared that an earlier statement of his was now “inoperative”.

CNN’s mindless colloquialism about the White House “not being aggressive enough” fits the Ziegler formula. The crucial point is that the Bush team misunderstood terrorism from the moment they unpacked in Washington. Their monomania was spelled SADDAM HUSSEIN and their abundant errors of fact-gathering followed from this.

As Fareed Zakaria has written in Newsweek, the president’s men thought states commit terror, not free-lance operatives like bin Laden’s trainees. They came to office poised to face off against Iraq, Iran, North Korea. They did not understand the danger was social, ideological. That’s why, against the likes of Mohammad Atta, they were clueless.

Faith-based misunderstanding, not faulty testosterone, produced the FBI incapacity that Richard Clarke has described thusly: “I would like to think that had I been informed by the FBI that two senior al-Qaeda operatives who had been in a planning meeting earlier in Kuala Lumpur were now in the U. S., and we knew that, and we knew their names – and I think we even had their pictures – I would like to think I would have released or had the FBI release a press release, with the names, with their descriptions, held a press conference, tried to get their names and pictures on the front page of every paper – ‘America’s Most Wanted,’ the evening news – and caused a successful nationwide manhunt for those two, two of the nineteen hijackers.”

Faulty understanding, a. k. a. ideological blinders, resulted in the demotion of Richard Clarke – a hard-headed counterterrorist fixture from the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations into the Bush II White House, and a Republican voter to boot – as reported by former Clinton assistant Sidney Blumenthal: “One of the first official acts of the incoming Bush administration in January 2001 was to demote the office of national coordinator for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, a position held by Richard A. Clarke”.

To anyone with an open mind, the whistle-blowing civil servant Clarke has exposed Bush’s ideological blinders. But his testimony before the 11 September commission, while compelling, didn’t air live on America’s major networks. It didn’t stop dinner-table conversation as the Watergate hearings did.

So America is not (yet) having the robust debate it deserves on the nature of the enemy. Over and over, CNN, one of those danged “liberal media” in the eyes of those who take their fair and balanced gospel from Fox News, fails to clarify what’s at stake. Along these lines, Geraldine Sealey, who compiles Salon.com’s excellent War Room campaign coverage, noted last week that CNN domestic reported on April 30, 2001, that “a senior State Department official tells CNN the U. S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and ‘personalizing terrorism.’”

In the reign of titanic error, a misjudged CNN adjective may seem a small matter. But of many such failures of intelligence – not “aggressiveness” – are large stupefactions made.