Whistle blows, and Bush jumps

By RUPERT CORNWELL

Richard Clarke's explosive memoirs are the latest in a long and honoured Washington tradition - the insider's account of an administration, motivated usually by revenge or a large publisher's advance, that becomes an instant sensation.

This time, the stakes are exceptionally high, as the ferocity of the White House response to Clarke's charges demonstrates. If his accusation sticks - that George W. Bush, fixated by Iraq, neglected the al Qaeda threat before the September 11, 2001, attacks - the consequences for the President's election campaign could be devastating.

By charging in Against All Enemies that Bush and his senior advisers mistakenly neglected al Qaeda in the spring and summer of 2001 to focus on Iraq, Clarke has re-ignited the debate over whether the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington could have been prevented. And he challenges the central theme of the President's re-election campaign, Bush's resolve and competence in dealing with terrorism.

Oddly the in-house whistleblower is a species that flourishes under Republican rather than Democratic administrations, in part because daily leaks from the Republicans tend to be fewer.

True, there were several insider accounts of Bill Clinton's White House. But most, like All Too Human by his former close adviser George Stephanopoulos, had a somewhat wistful quality, depicting Clinton as a potentially great president diminished by failings of the flesh.

Memoirs of the George W. Bush White House have taken an opposite tack. Their broad thrust is that its moralistic, super-efficient facade hides a ruthless, politically motivated and sometimes bumbling reality.

There have been three examples. The first was a long 2002 magazine article by John DiIulio, head of the White House's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives until August 2001, who charged that the entire Bush operation was run by the President's political advisers acting at the behest of right-wing groups.

DiIulio was forced into a grovelling apology reminiscent of a set-piece recantation at a Stalinist show trial - driven, it was widely said, by a threat to cut federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania where he was a professor.

Far more damaging were the recollections of Paul O'Neill, the Treasury Secretary sacked by Bush in December 2002, depicting the President as a man who never listened to an opposing point of view, and whose Administration was fixated with Iraq from the moment it came to office.

O'Neill's views were damaging enough for the White House to mount a harsh counter-attack, portraying the former Cabinet member as a loose cannon whose views were not to be trusted, and who was never close to the real centre of power.

Because of O'Neill's prolific record of gaffes, that strategy largely succeeded.

But Clarke may be the exception to the general rule that critical memoirs by former insiders have little lasting impact.

His timing could not have been better, at the start of a presidential campaign in which Iraq and terrorism will be key issues, and coinciding with public testimony by top Clinton and Bush officials to the bipartisan commission investigating the September 11 attacks.

And his version backs O'Neill on a crucial point - that Iraq was an obsession for the incoming Administration, and that the decision to go to war was probably made if not before September 11, 2001, then soon afterwards.

Clarke may have been a sharp-elbowed and ambitious bureaucratic operator.

But he was one of the most experienced US counter-terrorism specialists and, contrary to the assertion of Vice-President Dick Cheney, very much "in the loop".

His judgment was respected by Republican and Democratic administrations.

Top Bush officials have tried to portray him as a disgruntled Democrat, angry at being passed over for a senior post in the new Homeland Security department after leaving the White House.

But politically, Clarke is an independent with Republican leanings who cannot be accused of partisanship.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan tried to suggest that Clarke, through his long friendship with John Kerry's foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, was basically a Democrat. But in his book, the former White House adviser criticises Democrats and Republicans.

Colleagues have spoken out in support of Clarke's main thrust, that in almost every instance of terrorism - from the attempted Iraqi assassination of the first President Bush in 1993 to the al Qaeda attacks in the Middle East and Africa, he argued for a stronger response than the Bush or Clinton administrations could or would deliver.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq