BUY MY BOOK
So, you're the counterterrorism expert when the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil occurs. You have several choices. Analyze your work for lessons learned, blame your failure on someone else or write a book and blame your failure on someone else. Unknown-until-yesterday Richard Clark did the latter. He's upset that the Bush Administration, immediately upon taking office, didn't set policy according to the recommendations of this staffer. Bush's economic and education proposals that Bush ran on certainly should have been put aside because Richard Clarke said it was time to act. Clinton can be forgiven for 8 years of doing nothing about Al Qaeda, after all, Clarke understands he was too busy perjuring himself and turning the Oval Office into Greg Brady's goovy bachelor pad. But in those 8 months, Bush should have heeded Clarke's genius insight into terrorist plans and bombed Afghanistan -- never mind that Bush wouldn't have had time to convince even Britain to get on board with that plan. And never mind that the first major foreign policy enunciation was the anti-Al Qaeda plan.

Then Clarke complains that Bush wanted to find a Saddam-connection to Al Qaeda. That Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld were focused on Iraq at the exclusion of the Al Qaeda threat. Never mind that one month after September 11 the invasion of Afghanistan began and it took a year and a half for the administration to apply the newly articulated Bush Doctrine - attack the terrorists and those harbor them - to Saddam's terror-supporting state.

File this under "20/20, hindsight," and cross-reference to "Fault, not mine". And also, "Book, increasing sales".