P.S. Your Government Failed You
July 18th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
President George W. Bush’s former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke continued his criticism of his old boss George W. during a Netroots Nation panel Friday.
The former White House insider called for an overhaul of the Department of Homeland Security and took the military leadership to task for caving in to Bush and Cheney, allowing troops to go into Iraq and Afghanistan unprepared and under-equipped.
Following the trend of many Netroots panelists, he also plugged his new book, Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters. The gist of Clarke’s book is that the United States is suffering from an unprecedented systemic failure when it comes to national security, and that whoever moves into the White House in 2009 will have to disentangle the mess and start over again.
In 2004, Clarke famously apologized to the families of 9-11 victims at the beginning of his testimony during the 9-11 Commission hearings with the words “…your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter because we failed.”
The former White House staffer resigned in 2003 in protest of Bush’s misguided rush to war in Iraq. Military commanders should have resigned in protest as well rather than plunge into an ill-fated war, he said. Panel mediator Randy Beers nodded in agreement. Beers, like Clarke, resigned from the National Security Council in protest of the war.
“There is something wrong with the way we have developed our military culture,” Clarke told the audience. “When something outrageous happens like invading Iraq with no justification and no equipment, it is the obligation of the military leadership to protect their troops and they didn’t.”
Clarke also had some sharp words for the Department of Homeland Security, which he described as lacking transparency and oversight from Congress. “Congress has done a horrible job of overseeing Homeland Security,” he said. “And so has the media.” He touched on what he called the “industrial intelligence complex” — thousands of private companies that now do the work of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
“There are literally thousands of people in the for profit sector who are doing this work and we don’t know what the contracts are worth and there is no oversight — it’s totally out of control,” he said.
This brought to mind Boeing’s border fence contract, which spans 6,000 miles and has no spending limit.
He also lambasted the number of political appointees in the Department of Homeland Security. “They’ve put more political appointees in there than in any other federal agency,” he said of the Bush Administration. “People who can’t even spell Homeland Security are suddenly showing up to save us from Al Qaeda and the result is duct tape, the FEMA disaster during Hurricane Katrina and a lot of political pork.”
The agency needs to be downsized and given a clear objective, he said.
Clarke emphasized global warming as one of the most important national security issues that has been ignored by the current administration for the past seven years. “When people look back at the most pressing issues of our time it won’t be terrorism but global warming,” he said. “The United States not only failed to act it prevented other countries from doing something about it as well.”
Clarke said that the tragedies of last eight years could not simply be fixed by electing a new president. “No matter who you elect, unless you understand what went wrong in the system, placing all of your hope in one person won’t help.”
In a final plug for his book, Clarke said many excellent books had already been released enumerating the litany of Bush disasters but that none of these books had offered suggestions on how to fix the mess.
Currently Clarke has a part-time gig teaching a course called “Getting Things Done in Government” to political science majors at the prestigious Kennedy School of Government. To help our next president “get things done in government” he has included 12 suggestions in his book to polish the U.S.’ tarnished reputation. Let’s hope they work.
