Richard Clarke's book and 60 minutes interview is today's big campaign story and tomorrow's fish wrap. It did bring the new charge that Viacom uses 60 minutes to push books. That's just the sort of argument that the opponents of media consolidation have been using for a good while. They gave similar time to Paul O'Neill when his (their) book was being published. Cheney was on Rush today explaining that Clarke is a louse.
George Smith wrote an interesting article about Richard Clarke on February 17th that Drudge linked today.
The retirement of Richard Clarke is appropriate to the reality of the war on terror. Years ago, Clarke bet his national security career on the idea that electronic war was going to be real war. He lost, because as al Qaeda and Iraq have shown, real action is still of the blood and guts kind.
In 1986, as a State Department bureaucrat with pull, he came up with a plan to battle terrorism and subvert Muammar Qaddafi by having SR-71s produce sonic booms over Libya. This was to be accompanied by rafts washing onto the sands of Tripoli, the aim of which was to create the illusion of a coming attack. When this nonsense was revealed, it created embarrassment for the Reagan administration and was buried.
In 1998, according to the New Republic, Clarke "played a key role in the Clinton administration's misguided retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which targeted bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan." The pharmaceutical factory was, apparently, just a pharmaceutical factory, and we now know how impressed bin Laden was by cruise missiles that miss.
This campaign is going to be nothing but picking off cranks one at a time.
UPDATE: John Podhoretz reviews the new book for fun.
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