Josh Marshall’s profound insouciance

After expending untold electrons on his blog about the unimpeachable Richard Clarke, Josh Marshall is placidly unconcerned about Clarke’s comments back in August 2002 when he was vigorously defending the White House. All part of his job!

In any case, the larger point I think is this: Career civil servants working for a given White House do tend to follow that White House's spin when they're giving background briefings. That's hardly a surprise. It's somewhat in the nature of the enterprise.

So, according to Marshall, Clarke had an incentive to shade the truth back then, but he has no incentive (order your book now at Amazon and get 30% off the $27 list price!) to do so now. Later, in his post, Josh points readers towards this piece in Slate by Fred Kaplan. I’ll quote the key part:

But on to the substance. Clarke's main argument…is that Bush has done (as Clarke put it on CBS) "a terrible job" at fighting terrorism. Specifically: In the summer of 2001, Bush did almost nothing to deal with mounting evidence of an impending al-Qaida attack.

Yet here’s Clarke in the 2002 background briefing:

And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.
So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.

And then changed the strategy from one of rollback with Al Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of Al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline.

So “almost nothing” was quintupling the budget to fight Al-Qaeda, picking up on the issues left behind by Clinton, and employing a new strategy for the “rapid elimination” of the terrorist group.

I agree with Glenn Reynolds: “This guy’s working for Rove.”

Also, be sure to check out Dodd’s analysis of Josh Marshall’s response to the Clarke flip-flop.