White House Counters Clarke Criticism (washingtonpost.com): "Clarke said that after debating for a week after Sept. 11 whether to attack Iraq or Afghanistan, the administration decided that 'they had to do Afghanistan first' because it was obvious that al Qaeda, which was based in Afghanistan, was behind the attacks.

This is outrageous. I had heard that they wanted to use 9/11 to attack Iraq, but the thought of them debating whether or not to attack the people who actually attacked us, or Saddam Hussein is criminal. How could they be so calculating, when people were still in shock in NY and all around the country. Read on for more: But he said the response 'was slow and small' and the Bush administration did not go all out to send troops into Afghanistan and eliminate al Qaeda and bin Laden because it was holding back a larger effort for Iraq.
'We should have put U.S. special forces in immediately, not many weeks later,' Clark told ABC. 'U.S. special forces didn't get into the area where bin Laden was for two months, and we tried to have the Afghans do it. You know, basically the president botched the response to 9/11. He should have gone right after Afghanistan, right after bin Laden. And then he made the whole war on terrorism so much worse by invading Iraq.'
Clarke added: 'U.S. soldiers went to their deaths in Iraq thinking that they were avenging 9/11, when Iraq had nothing to do with it. . . . They died for the president's own agenda, which had nothing to do with the war on terrorism. And in fact, by going into Iraq, the president has made the war on terrorism that much harder. He's diverted resources from protecting our vulnerabilities here at home, like our railroads. He's inflamed the Arab world and created a whole new generation of al Qaeda terrorists. "
- posted by geoff @ #