Phil Carter:

The London Daily Telegraph (registration required) reports today on testimony by the Chief of Defence Staff that Britain's Army will not be ready to mount another major combat operation for five years because of what it has expended in spirit, blood and treasure to fight with America in Iraq. Like the U.S. Army, the British Army has been stretched to its limits by its worldwide deployments -- many in support of the global war on terrorism.

...

The cost of the war in Iraq shouldn't just be measured in terms of dollars or lives spent -- it should also be seen as an expenditure of American military power that precludes the expenditure of American (and allied) military power for other purposes. It's like you've got a six-shooter and several targets -- if you're smart, you pick the most threatening targets and shoot them first, and as accurately as possible, to conserve ammo for future targets and hopefully to survive. America and her allies have a finite military capacity, just like the bullets in a revolver, and if we shoot up our bullets at one target (Iraq), we will have less to shoot at others (e.g. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, the tri-border region of South America, etc.) Ultimately, this means that the U.S. may be less secure in the future for expending its military capacity on Iraq today.

Not good.

...Drum got to it first. Sigh.

So far?

$107,975,883,607.

No. I'm sorry. Now it's:

$107,975,940,706.

Oops. It's actually:





...not like I need to tell you, but the number above is only part of the opportunity cost.

Kos poster DHinMI:

Reading and listening to the reactions people have had to Clarke's book, his appearances in the media, and now to his stunning testimony before the 9-11 panel, it appears that we may have reached a turning point. Richard Clarke is easily believed and not easily dismissed. Karl Rove wasted his ammunition on earlier whistle blowers like John Dilulio and Paul O'Neil, who, compared to Clarke, are minor leaguers. Despite the assists of hacks like Lehman and the slimeballs at Fox News, this whistleblower will be hard to marginalize and ignore. The political heart of the Bush presidency is counter-terrorism, and their former counter-terrorism expert may have just ripped out their heart.

Richard Clarke is a hawk, appears to have been a Republican, and most balanced summaries of his career show him to have been a bit of a loose cannon too smitten by covert actions and insufficiently respectful of civil liberties. But he's the type of knowledgeable, dogged, and passionate analyst on whom every successful administration must rely for honest and non-ideological appraisals and advice. However, this administration doesn't value analysts, it values acolytes. Thus, it's not surprising this outraged insider has so effectively exposed the rank incompetence and rotten dishonesty at the center of the Bush administration. Furthermore, this administration doesn't respect people who aren't cynical idolaters of power like themselves; it's to be expected that they wouldn't heed the advice of someone whose character and motivations are so different from their own. The leaders of the Bush administration wouldn't listen to Richard Clarke because, as he proved today, he is fundamentally what they will never be. Richard Clarke is a mensch, and Richard Clarke is a patriot.

Billmon on the media:

Clarke's interview, and his book, both go a long way towards demolishing the picture of Bush as the stalwart commander that Bob Woodward painted in his book, Bush at War. Woodward, the outsider turned insider, has been discredited by Clarke, the insider turned outsider.

It's a hell of a circle we've come when a former ace investigative journalist, the scourge of Richard Nixon, is part of the cover up, and a career national security bureaucrat like Richard Clarke is the one blowing the whistle.

Pogo certainly had it right, at least as far as American journalism is concerned: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

We knew there had to be some reason for the Hitch's apostasy...

It has been over a year since the Bush Administration boldly embarked upon a mission that was 10 years too late, but not a moment too soon. I wrote last December, perhaps through rose-tinted glasses, but I think ensuing events have proven me prescient, that I looked forward to the day when I would be able to raise a glass with old Kurdish comrades in newly liberated Iraq.

That day has come at long last. The tyrant’s vast stores of whiskey, gin, rum, vodka and other long oppressed spirits are free. Free from Saddam’s dungeons, where they were tortured unmercifuly; assaulted with aerated waters, their innocent and pure bodies torn asunder and poisoned with impurities in fiendish experiments, the fullness of their aspirations diluted by a madman’s icy depravities.

Dear, dear me.

Glib responses about the "freedom" now enjoyed by the Iraqis just won't do it.

Phil Carter explains:

Second, I think there is a great deal of merit to the assertion that the focus on Iraq has diverted all sorts of political, military, economic and diplomatic energy away from the fight on terrorism. Notwithstanding the pedantic assertions of neo-cons like James Taranto and others who constantly say we're not distracted, the pure military calculus of the issue is irrefutable. We have roughly 11,000 military personnel in Afghanistan right now according to GlobalSecurity.Org. In terms of combat personnel, this includes a sizable special operations component and roughly one brigade combat team of light infantry. In Iraq today, we have more than 10 times that number of aggregate personnel, including 16 brigade combat teams of heavy and light forces. American infantry and special operations forces have played a cat-and-mouse game with Al Qaeda in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than two years, and one has to wonder about how effective this would've been if we had put some of the combat power into Afghanistan that we have put into Iraq.

Moreover, the U.S. has devoted so much combat power to Iraq for the near term that it has substantially constrained its ability to (1) deploy additional forces to existing theaters of operations, e.g. Afghanistan and (2) deploy forces to new hotspots like Haiti or the Philippines, which may or may not be part of the global war on terrorism. So the question is not merely "How has the war on Iraq affected the U.S. war on terrorism?" -- the question is also "How has the war on Iraq constrained future exercises of American power abroad, by limiting the forces available to the President?" I think it's safe to say that we did not foresee these long-term issues in early 2003, largely because the White House planned Operation Iraqi Freedom on the assumption that "we would be greeted as liberators." (See James Fallows' brilliant piece "Blind Into Baghdad," as well as my Washington Monthly piece "Faux Pax Americana", for more on this.) Today, we are not only distracted from the more important war on Al Qaeda, but we are hamstrung in the other things we'd like to achieve in the world.

Economists like to talk about "marginal costs" and "marginal benefits" when discussing the pro's and con's (in economic terms) of a given decision by a rational actor. It is becoming increasingly clear, one year after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that the marginal cost of our Iraqi operation outweighs the marginal benefit. And more importantly, that the U.S. may have bought more for its buck by putting the billions spent on OIF into other endeavors. Imagine the marginal benefit earned for every dollar spent if we put $87 billion into cooperative threat reduction, or into the Department of Homeland Security, or CBRNE training for local first responders, or any number of other anti-terrorism/counter-terrorism initiatives. I know enough about the appropriations process to know that federal money isn't entirely fungible, but I think this is a valid question because of the enormous debt we have taken on in order to liberate Iraq. It can still be argued that Saddam was a bad guy, and that OIF was a good thing for the people of Iraq and the region. But given America's finite resources, and the need to combat other threats in the world, I'm not sure that it can be argued that Operation Iraqi Freedom was the right choice at the right time for America.

I wish I had more faith in the ability of the American people to grasp a concept as simple as opportunity cost.

...and, lo! Tom Schaller over at the Gadflyer speaks directly to the opportunity costs of Iraq.

Steve over at No More Mister speculates on why the message just doesn't seem to penetrate.

A big reason that it's harder to run against Bush '04 than against Bush '92 is, paradoxically, the fact that what we're charging Bush '04 with is so appalling: We're saying that he shed U.S. soldiers' blood in an utterly unnecessary war while pulling resources from the fight he should have been fighting -- that he took his eye off the ball and effectively suspended the fight against the mass murderers who should have been our prime target.

People can accept that their president, their commander in chief, their daddy, might be, you know, a bit of a screw-up -- that he might be tooling around cluelessly in a cigarette boat while the economy tanks. It's harder for most people to accept that he might duck into the Situation Room and send soldiers to die in the wrong country.

I think a major reason this is true is the level of ridiculous, shrill GOP hyperbole about the Clenis -- y'know, "they" murdered Vince Foster, cheated on land deals, assassinated Ron Brown by shooting down his plane, etc. The American people have been desensitized to claims of this nature. They're seen as de rigeur in an election year and, if not nakedly political, at least worthy of initial discredit.

There must be a tipping point somewhere, though -- the Nixon phenomenon -- which Steve alludes to:

Unless there's an unambiguous smoking gun tying the administration directly to whatever is making America afraid, I don't think Bush's failings and shortcomings will matter -- most Americans will cleave to him if they're afraid. We aren't the Spanish.

How many esteemed public servants must step forward before the message sinks in and popular support for Bush collapses? It's impossible to know, but if the Clarke thing doesn't really damage Bush's numbers (two months from now, let's say), and the 9/11 report similarly doesn't, I'm not sure that I'm all that optimistic either.

...it helps when the GOP doesn't march in lockstep. Thanks, Senator:

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said he believes the White House has to respond directly to Clarke's allegations rather than question his credibility. "This is a serious book written by a serious professional who's made serious charges, and the White House must respond to these charges," he said.

The big hack guns are coming out -- notably, Podhoretz, who gets points for trying today in the Post.

Jesse has the story.

Via Steve G:

According to today's WH press gaggle, Clarke was a registered Republican in 2000.

Political my ass.

Atrios:

On the Newshour, Richard Clarke just said that the publication of the book had been delayed for 3 months because the White House delayed clearing it for publication. So, if not for their meddling, it would have been before any reasonable person could have accused him of being "political" for releasing it during the election season.

Not likes it makes a difference for the GOP drones; they'll still lie.

...Atrios unfortunately neglects to mention that Clarke, in the Newshour interview, also pledges, categorically, that he will take no position in the Kerry administration. From the transcript:

RICHARD CLARKE: No, Margaret, I don't. I'm not working for the Kerry campaign, and I'll say this now. If John Kennedy -- if John Kerry -- gets elected president, and if John Kerry offers me a job, I will not accept it. I don't want to be part of the Kerry administration. I've done 30 years in government. That's not what this is about.

This book would have come out three months earlier if the White House hadn't taken three months to clear it. It sat in the White House for three months or else it would have been out earlier.

Clarke responds to other attacks on him, also:

MARGARET WARNER: They also say that you and, in fact, most of U.S. intelligence were focused, during this phase of the summer of 2001, there was all of this chatter, and the belief was that the attack would occur on American interests overseas not here at home and that you did not have any kind of proposals or plan for really making the homeland more secure.

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, the opposite is true there as well. The CIA did say that they thought the attack would come in either Saudi Arabia or Israel, but I wasn't sure that it might not take place here. So I asked the FBI, the FAA, the Customs Service, the Immigration Service, the Coast Guard, and 18,000 local police departments -- state and local police departments -- as well as all of the aircraft owners, all of the airlines, all of the airports to go on alert.

I held a series of meetings with all of those domestic security organizations, and well before I was asked to do so by Dr. Rice, began that process of sending out alerts to domestic security organizations.

MARGARET WARNER: So what more could the president have done if he was paying the kind of attention you feel he should have that might have thwarted the 9/11 attacks?

RICHARD CLARKE: Well, two things. First of all, we could have adopted a policy right away, and a strategy, given presidential authorization, presidential decisions and money, to begin the process of eliminating the al-Qaida sanctuary in Afghanistan. And moreover, if we had had those meetings, chaired by Dr. Rice with the attorney general, with the FBI director, every day or every other day after we received the threat information, they would have gone back to the Justice Department and the FBI, shaken the trees, and out of the trees we now know would have fallen information that was in the FBI that two of the hijackers were in the United States.

Margaret, if we had known the names of those two hijackers, we could have put them on the front page of every paper in the country. We could have rounded up those two hijackers, and then the FBI might have been able to pull the string and find the other members of the al-Qaida cell.

Listen to the interview here. Clarke is sober, self-assured, and very, very convincing.

That leg on the one-legged stool looks kinda shaky.

More Josh, on Cheney:

Isn't it time someone asked him about the fact that senior members of his staff are at the center of a criminal investigation into the intentional leak of the identity of a clandestine operative at the CIA?

He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?

He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?

He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?

He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?

He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?

He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?

He's doing a lot of press. Why is no one asking him about this?

But in this bizarro-world anti-Joementum, our man Joe actually tries to deflate Clarke's criticism of Bush. Seriously.

I wish that there would be some Joementum for a real Democrat to replace Joe as CT's senator. Or perhaps some Joementum for Joe's immediate and permanent retirement from politics.

The guy's so wedded to Iraq that he can't get away from supporting Bush. What an abject, miserable fuck.

Heh. They can't even get their ad hominem attacks against Clarke straight. Cheney's probably the one who has the official lie wrong, given his past propensity for rhetorically leaving the rez.

Compare:

Bartlett:

The White House responded that it kept Clarke on its staff after the election because of its concerns over al-Qaida. "He makes the charge that we were not focused enough on efforts to root out terrorism," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said Sunday. "That's just categorically false."

and Cheney:

RUSH: All right, let's get straight to what the news is all about now before we branch out to things. Why did the administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?

CHENEY: Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things. That is, he was given the new assignment at some point there. I don't recall the exact time frame.

RUSH: Cybersecurity? Meaning Internet security?

CHENEY: Yeah, worried about attacks on computer systems and sophisticated information technology systems we have these days that an adversary would use or try use.

RUSH: Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there.

CHENEY: Well, he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff, and I saw part of his interview last night.

So, um, which was it? Clarke was kept on because of the Administration's continuing concern about al-Qaeda, or was it that he was kept on but demoted to cybersecurity stuff, with no broader counterterrorist responsibilities?

[Karol, you seem to be the closest thing to a party hack who dares to show their face 'round here. You wanna talk to your masters and clarify this for us?]

...Josh points out that Cheney's lie doesn't make much sense -- and if it's true, is more of an indictment of the Administration than Clarke.

Just saw Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes. Very, very damning. I'm sure AWOL's apologists will find something to say, but Clarke comes across as authoritative and honest -- and also, not particularly partisan. The only hatchet thrown, from my recollection, was from an anonymous WH official, who intimated that Clarke wants an admin job with Kerry.

Bush is sitting on a one-legged stool. If you take away his authority on terrorism, this election is over.

...of course, Drudge would have an oppo link on Clarke. Apparently, he's an incompetent. Repeat after me: Attack the messenger, not the message. Attack the messenger, not the message. Attack the messenger, not the message.

In happier times prior to 9/11, Clarke -- as Bill Clinton's counter-terror point man in the National Security Council -- devoted great effort to convincing national movers and shakers that cyberattack was the coming thing. While ostensibly involved in preparations for bioterrorism and trying to sound alarms about Osama bin Laden, Clarke was most often seen in the news predicting ways in which electronic attacks were going to change everything and rewrite the calculus of conflict.

September 11 spoiled the fun, though, and electronic attack was shoved onto the back-burner in favor of special operations men calling in B-52 precision air strikes on Taliban losers. One-hundred fifty-thousand U.S. soldiers on station outside Iraq make it perfectly clear that cyberspace is only a trivial distraction

...This guy, George Smith, is no Clarke lover. He's had it in for Clarke since at least December 2000, according to this page (scroll down). Exactly what he's claiming Clarke failed to do is unclear, but Smith appears not to be a GOP Hack -- he's just being used.

Steve Gilliard, via Atrios:

If Richard Clarke is right, and there is every reason to think he is, the US was days, if not hours, away from letting Osama Bin Laden get away with murder.

It seems Rumsfeld wanted to bomb Iraq for 9/11, despite ample evidence Al Qaeda was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans. To a rational person, this would have been a war crime. Bombing the innocent for something we knew they didn't do.

Perle and Wolfwowitz, despite all available evidence, would have let Osama sit in Afghanistan untouched just to get Saddam. The fact that no state would have ever launched a 9/11 attack and not expect a B-2 response was beyond them.

Let's keep this in mind, and it's really simple: the Bush response to 9/11 would have let Osama get away with murder, killing thousands of innocent people. Only the professionals of the CIA and FBI prevented this insanity. When Bush was told that "you'll lose the whole world", was he prevented from attacking Iraq.

Wow. And there's more.