In today’s New York Times, Richard Clarke and his Clinton-era NSC colleague Steven Simon write 856 words on why the U.S. should not use force, if necessary, against Iran’s nuclear program. Though they raise very legitimate issues that should be virgorously debated, nowhere in the piece do they take a position on whether Iran should be allowed to build a nuclear weapon. And, if not, how do we stop it? Do they agree with Senator Clinton’s warning that “a nuclear-armed Iran would shake the foundations of global security to its very core”? They don’t say. How do they think Tehran will behave if it gets a nuclear bomb? Will they be bolder in sponsoring terror or more restrained? Will they assume a more aggressive posture in the Middle East or a less assertive one? Again, they don’t say. It’s seems rather odd that two senior NSC officials would ignore this nuclear elephant in the room and then chastise others for not asking the “hard questions” on Iran. They do write about how great the 1990s were. We learn that Iranian intelligence hit Khobar Towers, killing 19 Americans, but the Clinton White House decided against an overt retaliatory strike. They hit back covertly but the authors offer few details except to say that it allegedly “immobilized Iran’s intelligence service.” They also claim credit for ignoring Newt Gingrich’s advice to pursue regime change in Iran. Instead they engaged Tehran, which led to “the election of the reformist Mohammad Khatami as president of Iran in 1997….” Of course, as Reuel Marc Gerecht explains, the Khatami regime was, for starters, “probably the period when the clerical regime made its greatest advances in its nuclear-weapons program.” (Update: Monday’s New York Times reports that “Dr. Khan had supplied Libya and North Korea with actual P-2 centrifuges in the late 1990’s, and they repeatedly heard that he had done likewise with Iran.”) Clarke isn’t alone in trying to convince us just how great the Clinton years were. Last month, Madeleine Albright hammered away at the Bush administration’s conduct of foreign policy but whitewashed that of her boss. Now it’s Richard Clarke’s turn — though next time he’ll perhaps answer some of the “hard questions” he chose to ignore in today’s NYT.
