Condi

Maybe all the conspiracy theorists are on to something this time. Maybe the Bush administration really did maneuver its enemies into apoplectic fits about Rice's original unwillingness to testify. The left wondered what the administration could be hiding with its stonewalling, and the right just stood around wondering what all the fuss was about.

Today, Rice is testifying, and it can't feel good to be John Kerry this morning.

She said confronting terrorists competed with other foreign policy concerns when the president came into office, but added that the administration's top national security advisers completed work on the first major national security policy directive of the administration on Sept. 4. The subject, she said, was "not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaida."

Bush, she said, "understood the threat, and he understood its importance," she said.

"He made clear to me that he did not want to respond to al-Qaida one attack at a time. He told me he was 'tired of swatting flies'," Rice told the commission.

And Rice always comes across as a credible voice. Unlike Clarke, who seems to be the disgruntled former employee that he actually is. Clarke spent time with an empty apology, acrimony, and no harsh words for a Clinton administration that had eight years to combat terrorism and failed to do so in any meaningful manner.

Then he apologized, but it was an empty thing. Apologies, admissions of guilt, aren't usually surrounded by so much self promotion. His went something like this: "Gosh, I had some great ideas. For all those years in office, I was telling people what to do, but no one really listened to me. If only they had listened to me, September 11 may not have happened. I'm sorry America. I'm sorry no one listened to me. It was really all President Bush's fault, though."

The simple, utterly human and tragic fact that lies underneath all the testimony is that no one in a position to make policy really understood the threat fully until 9/11. No one got it in the White House, no one got it on the street, and only a few policy geeks who everyone else thought were part of the tinfoil hat brigade understood the growing threat. No matter what anyone else says in the testimonies, that is the basis of what I believe to be true. We just didn't understand.

I'm not feeling so quick to lay blame on the subject, though. What I am looking for now is leadership that does get it. I want leadership that took the wake-up call and actually woke up, facing the seriousness and immediacy of this threat with the gravity that it deserves. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the leadership of the left is offering up only blame and exit strategies when it should be defining its plans for continuing the war to its conclusion.

Someday, the greater portion of the threat will be over. Terrorism will still exist, but we'll have minimized the threats and found ways to combat terror effectively--this I believe. When that day comes, we can go back to our normal partisan sniping over the tiniest issues of law. Until then, though, we have more important things to think about.

Read about Condi's early testimony.

Posted by zombyboy at April 8, 2004 08:06 AM | TrackBack