Two pivotal recent events should make a shambles of President Bush's contention right after 9/11 that a War on Terrorism would be the defining mission of his presidency.
In late January David Kay, the president's own chief weapons inspector, admitted that no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons were found in Iraq. That finally made it respectable to question the wisdom of the Iraq war.
Then, last week, the explosive testimony of former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke invited intense discussion about whether the Bush administration had done enough to avert the 9/11 attack.
However, a third and even more important inference is just now seeping into public consciousness: The failure to protect the United States against terrorism is ongoing, and directly related to Iraq.
The Iraq detour has set back America's security in at least five mutually reinforcing ways.
First, the war distracted top officials from domestic preparedness, which remains in organizational chaos. No senior White House official is coordinating anti-terrorism, which sprawls across the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the hapless Department of Homeland Security.
Second, the war diverted resources -- regular troops, commandos, Arab speaking analysts, and Predator missiles, which otherwise might have been deployed to tighten the noose around al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Two precious years have been lost.
Third, Iraq replicated the very scene that triggered Osama bin Laden's holy war in the first place -- the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, after the first Gulf War. Iraq repeats a direct American occupation of a Muslim nation, helping recruit new young Jihadists unknown to western intelligence agencies.
Fourth, despite blather about a "forward strategy" to advance democracy, the Iraq war significantly reduced American leverage against Syria and Iran (who really do harbor terrorist organizations like Hezbollah) because we need their military cooperation to secure Iraq's borders. We've also lost leverage with Saudi Arabia, breeding ground of al-Qaeda.
Finally, the war undermined foreign cooperation against terrorists. "It used to be that when relations became testy with our friends, at least the intelligence cooperation continued to work," says a former CIA station chief in a Mideast post. "I used to be able to walk into a president or a prime minister and say, 'Look, here's the deal.' I guarantee, today they'd say, 'Sure, get out of here.'"
A former ambassador told me, "Cooperating with the United States starts being seen as a political liability. It becomes repugnant to the political class."
Whatever you think of Richard Clarke's motives, this larger story of the anti-terrorism fiasco has been hidden in plain view for the past year. Much of Clarke's tale of White House misplaced priorities, and more, was previously revealed by former national security senior officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, in their 2003 book, "The Age of Sacred Terror." It has been documented in a score of reports by the RAND Corporation, the General Accounting Office, the Markle and Century Foundations, three national commissions, and a dozen Congressional reports.
Nor are others who've observed this fiasco close up shy about revealing their frustrations to reporters. "It's bad enough that they screwed it up before 9/11," says a career counter-intelligence official -- not Richard Clarke -- who served well into the Bush administration. "What's really galling is that these people screwed up afterwards."
Unfortunately, much of the media, especially television, still treats all of this as a merely partisan story of charge and counter-charge. It is not. The administration's gross failure to keep America safe from terrorism has been amply documented.
Instead of reducing the story to a partisan catfight, the media should grasp the immense import of what's been revealed. If I hear the phrase, "There's plenty of blame to go around" one more time, I may take an axe to the TV.
There is, however, a partisan implication. Before the Vietnam schism, Democrats and liberals were credibly tough about protecting America precisely because they were the realists, while the Republican right were the utopians.
While the right lobbied, in the late 1940s, to start World War III, statesmen like George Kennan appreciated that containment of Soviet expansion and George Marshall's plan for the reconstruction of Europe added up to better policy. When rightwing loonies wanted to risk a nuclear exchange over Cuba, President Kennedy executed a policy that was both prudent and tough.
Now, courtesy of Bush's astonishing bungling, Democrats are on the verge of reclaiming that legacy -- not by being more extreme saber-rattlers, but by being better realists about how best to keep America safe. The country has never faced a more fateful choice.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
