Falling back

Several commentators, in analyzing Can'tbe Right's performance (the word is chosen deliberately) before the 9/11 Commission, made note of the fact that she "stuck to the script" of an engaged, concerned Bush. But actually she did more than that, and in that extra can be seen the outline version of the Bush team's latest fallback line of defense.

A new line was obviously necessary. The trashing of Richard Clarke had gained no traction: The media weren't playing along like they had in the past, as recently as with Paul O'Neill, in good part because the experienced in-fighter Clarke was adept at self-defense and counter-punch. Blaming the Clinton administration, a standard riff, was also out of tune because its defenders could point to specifics, including military retaliations, preventing an attack on Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, and - perhaps most importantly - specific warnings to the incoming Bush team of their concerns about al-Qaeda. (Note that this has nothing to do with approving or disapproving anything the Clinton people did or didn't do. This is about the political position the Bushites were in.) And there was too much information out there about pre-9/11 concerns expressed by a variety of sources to continue to go with the "nobody had any idea" defense.

So instead, Condi stuck to the script about Bush and insisted anew that nothing had been done prior to the WTC attacks because, well, no one told them about any domestic threats. All the info the FBI had about suspected terrorists in the US, the flying lessons some of them were taking (which did not involve learning how to take off or land), all the rest of the bits and pieces, somehow none of that made its way up the ladder to the exalted beings such as herself dwelling at the top of the heap.

Leave aside the fact that this is an outrageous lie that in a just world would have her in the dock for perjury and consider instead its overarching theme. It's a classic defense: Blame "the structure."

In this view, "everyone must share the blame" - in fact, blame is spread so widely that it can't actually be placed anywhere at all. Now Richard Clarke is no longer a money-grubbing, partisan, disgruntled ex-employee but a devoted civil servant and blame-sharer. Even the Clinton administration isn't really to blame, oh no, well, yes it is but not really more than anyone else because well, it's not really anyone's fault, you know. If only we had known.

In fact, this old-time defense was clearly developing before Condi took the stand. Bush himself had done it clumsily more than once.

Washington (AP, April 5) - President Bush said Monday he will tell the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that his administration lacked the information needed to prevent the terrorists from striking. ...

"Let me just be very clear about this," he said. "Had we had the information that was necessary to stop an attack, I'd have stopped the attack. ... If we'd have known that the enemy was going to fly airplanes into our buildings, we would have done everything in our power to stop it."

(There is actually a subtle aspect to this in that it serves to defend his administration against its failures by focusing on a very narrow point, that of not knowing the exact date and method of attack, but overall it serves the "we didn't know, we couldn't have known" meme.) But the point was also made more subtly by others. For example, on March 30, the Christian Science Monitor reported that

the issue may not be so much one of the people involved as the structure in place to deal with national security and specifically the terrorism threat, some experts say. ...

"If Henry Kissinger had been the national security adviser in July of 2001, he would have been in the same position as Rice," says [Raymond] Tanter[, a former NSC official in the Reagan administration]. "The problem was and in some ways continues to be international and domestic coordination. Even Kissinger, as strong as he was, had no authority to knock around somebody like [Attorney General] John Mitchell."

Tanter says the Clinton administration was successful in creating the foreign-domestic coordination "ad hoc," as seen in the successful derailing of a planned terrorist attack on Los Angeles International Airport in late 1999.

But he says the noninstitutionalized way in which that coordination was organized meant it was not automatically carried over into the new administration.

So even though it was done, it wasn't done. So nothing to do with Rice you see, or Bush for that matter. They were right there on terrorism. The problem is "the structure," aka the "culture of the bureaucracy."

This is, again, a classic defense. It has appeared in various guises at various times but the general thrust remains the same. In fact, Rice's testimony reminded me enough of something else that I dug through some old writings and found something I had written back on January 5, 1987 about Contragate.

And after a few committee hearings, some dust-gathering reports, several promises to "consult more closely with Congress," and a very intense, serious, and scholarly discussion of the organizational structure (but not the policies) of the NSC, we can smugly pat ourselves on the back in that way only Americans can, declare confidently "the system works!" and pretty much (and very gratefully) drop the whole unpleasant business. No structural changes get made, no basic foreign or military policy assumptions get challenged, and, most importantly, no status gets un-quoed.

Just like Reagan and Daddy did then, Junior is now setting up the "structure," in this case that of the intelligence services, to take the fall, diverting the flow of questions to something so amorphous as to be vaporous, avoiding dealing not only with the whats of what they did, but the whys, whys that should start by asking why they were so obsessed with Iraq that immediately in the wake of 9/11 that was their first thought.
(And no, asking if Iraq was involved was not "a reasonable question." There'd been no hint of Iraqi operations aimed at the US since at least 1993 but a string of al-Qaeda incidents. And if the question was "reasonable" because of our "hostile relations" with Iraq, what about Libya? Or Iran? Why weren't they also targets of inquiry? Why only Iraq?)

And then those whys should go beyond to questions about the whys of our policies, our relations with the rest of the world, particularly in this case the Muslim world. The 9/11 Commission's charge is to see if anything could have been done to prevent 9/11 and to recommend steps to prevent a recurrence. The Commission, however, is going to be looking at intelligence-gathering, "bureaucratic impediments to interagency information-sharing," "structures for rapid-response decision-making," and other such delights of the DC crowd. It will not be looking at the policies we as a nation have pursued, the governments we have supported, the actions we have taken ourselves or supported in others, that have helped to develop the climate and conditions in which such as al-Qaeda can flourish.

Which makes it all the more important that we do.

Footnote: From the Center for American Progress we learn that the media were not overly impressed with Rice.

Knight-Ridder ... headlined, "President Learned of a Plot, Aide Says".... [T]he Chicago Sun-Times headline says, "Rice's Answers Don't Resolve Questions," while the Dallas Morning News notes the puzzling testimony in its headline, "Rice: Terrorism Neither Ignored Nor At Top of Agenda." And while the policy debate continues, few can argue with the LA Times headline: "Rice Leaves Image of Detached Leaders."

It seems the Bush-Rove magic really is gone. Even pack journalism can have its good points.

Update April 10: Apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way. This is from an AP news analysis, April 8:

Washington - Condoleezza Rice offered little new information about the days leading up to Sept. 11, and instead determinedly shifted blame from the White House to a two-decade failure in the way U.S. intelligence fought terrorism.

From her opening statement to the occasional clashes with members during three hours of testimony Thursday, President Bush's national security adviser stuck closely to her message that blame for America's worst terror attack rested with administrations dating to Ronald Reagan.

GMTA.