David versus Goliath -- a political brawl made in America

On one side is Richard Clarke, the former bureaucrat and anti terrorism czar who served both Bill Clinton and George Bush, Jr. In his recently released best-selling book, Against All Enemies, Clarke says both heads of state -- but particularly the latter -- were asleep at the wheel while the country's mortal enemy snuck into the country to cause terrorist mayhem. Clarke charges that Bush ignored warnings about al-Qaida and pressured him to link 9-11 with Iraq.

On the other side is George Bush, Jr. and his team of neo-conservative ideologues, some famous (Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney) and some not so famous (Karen Hughes and Frank Miller). They are calling Clarke "irresponsible" and claim he doesn't know what he is talking about.

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They are doing their best to fix an image of him in the American public's mind as a bitter ex-bureaucrat whom Bush passed over for a top position and who is now out to help Senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential contender.

At a glance, the brawl looks like a mismatch: a modern day David versus Goliath. But Dick Clarke has held his own since he went public with his accusations last March 21. Opinion polls are showing that, at this point, only a slightly fewer percentage of Americans believe Bush.

After watching all of Clarke's impressive testimony before the 9-11 Commission last March 24, reading his absorbing book, and reflecting on events since 9-11, I'm one of those dissident Americans who accepts David's version of events. Clarke's words, both in his book and those he's using on the public airways to defend it, reveal a presidential administration that is ideological, obsessive, close minded and distracted from the main business at hand, or, in other words, one driven by screwed up priorities. That's my assessment of a presidential administration that has consistently shown it doesn't know what it's doing in the War on Terrorism.

Learning from Clarke how incompetent the Bush White House was in dealing with the real 'imminent' threat is nauseating enough. But Clarke's confirmation that, in responding to 9-11, the Bush administration deliberately went after the wrong target makes me wonder why no one has dared raised the spectre of impeachment, given the stakes in the War on Terrorism and the growing mess in Iraq. Was Bush obsessed with linking 9-11 to Saddam? Clarke writes that soon after 9-11 Bush "gathered a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. Look " he told us…" see if Saddam was involved, just look. I want to know any shred." Bush doesn't recall that conversation, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told the press, but Clarke has witnesses.

Nevertheless, despite his doubts about Saddam-9-11 link, the faithful bureaucrat went back to work to look again. He then completed a report. You guessed it -- no link.

"We sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the national security advisor or deputy," Clarke recalled in a televised interview. "It got bounced and sent back saying 'Wrong answer'."

Clarke is no dove or bleeding heart liberal and that's making it tough for Team Bush to discredit him. He's a registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000. He was a Cold War warrior who served that real cowboy, Ronald Reagan. He wanted to kill Osama Bin Laden, more so than his bosses in both the Clinton and Bush administrations did. A tough guy, who likes a fight, Clarke's friends reveal. In one of his first interviews Clarke predicted that team Bush would "unleash the dogs" on him. But Goliath didn't really have a choice.

If you can't pulverise the message, you have to try and destroy the messenger An all out war on Clarke has to be launched. Bush, after all, is running in this year's election on his record of "leadership" in the War on Terrorism.

And the lack of it is the point of Clarke's message and what has compelled him to go public. By focusing on Iraq, he has ignored the War on Terrorism, especially in Afghanistan, Clarke charges, and this misguided focus has allowed Al Qaida to change its stripes, making it even more difficult to destroy the terrorist group. So team Bush has embarked on a vicious anti-Clarke campaign that has been described as "character assassination." "Every time somebody comes up and says something the White House doesn't like, they don't answer the question about it or show you the truth about it," John Kerry said last March 27.

"They go into character assassination."

Previous victims of Bush character assassination campaigns include Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who dared to challenge the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gross miscalculation that the U.S. had enough troops in Iraq. It includes Joe Wilson, who wouldn't give reality to Team Bush's fantasy that an Iraq-Niger-uranium-nuclear weapon connection existed. Then there is former Secretary of the Treasury O'Neal, the first Team Bush administrator to report on the Bush obsession with Saddam.

And now the dogs have been unleashed on Clarke. Team Bush claims that what Clarke told the 9-11 Commission in earlier sworn testimony behind closed doors doesn't match up with what he wrote in his book and what he has said before the commission in open hearings. In other words team Bush is intimating that Clarke perjured himself. As has been pointed out, why doesn't Bush administration try to bring charges against Clarke, if he has committed perjury? So far, there hasn't been a media whiff about such a move.

Team Bush has called for the declassification of Clarke's secret testimony before the 9-11 commission. Clarke has called their bluff by agreeing with them. But as Clarke's defenders point out -- everything needs to be de-classified, not just what supports one side or the other.

The battle has made for interesting newspaper reading and television viewing, but in the end it won't as they say, amount to a hill of beans. Bush could pull American troops out of Iraq tomorrow and admit he made a mistake and it wouldn't change the opinions that many of his supporters and detractors have of him. And that is real polarisation -- the true legacy of Bush's first term in office.

Ron Chepesiuk, a South Carolina-based journalist, is a former Fulbright Scholar, a Visiting Professor at Chittagong University, and a Research Associate with National Defence College in Dhaka.