Another Republican Talks

Flynt Leverett -- Former Senior Director for Middle East Affairs on President Bush's National Security Council. He is a former CIA analyst and Middle East specialist. He is now a visiting fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East studies at the Brookings Institution.

He spoke to DN's Amy Goodman this morning. Here's a bit:

FLYNT LEVERETT: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Can you respond to what the administration is saying about Clarke’s critique?

FLYNT LEVERETT: Well, I think that they are beginning, finally, to offer something resembling a substantive response to Mr. Clarke's charges rather than simply impugning his character or his motives. But I think that Clarke has laid out a very serious and substantive critique of the way the administration has conducted the war on terror since the September 11 attacks. It's hard to get around the fact that critical resources were taken away from the Afghan theater, to my mind, prematurely, before we had finished the job against bin Laden. They were taken away because if they were going to be ready to do their part in an Iraq campaign on the timetable that the White House wanted to do it, you had to pull these people out in the early spring of 2002. I think it's because of that that we have not captured bin Laden, we have not captured Zawahiri. Al Qaeda has been able to reconstitute leadership cells in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and, it would seem, in Iran. If we had the right people on the ground in the spring and summer of 2002, I think we might have caught these people. If we catch them now, that's obviously a good thing, but -- if it's two years too late because Al Qaeda has morphed into a different sort of organization.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about who specifically was pulled from Afghanistan in March, 2002, to go to Iraq?

FLYNT LEVERETT: Well, I think I have said -- others and I have talked about these people being very highly trained, highly specialized -- special forces and intelligence officers. There's not an infinite supply of those sorts of people to go around. As I said, my view is that those people were pulled prematurely from Afghanistan because the administration was determined to go to war in Iraq on a specific timetable.

Listen here

Furthermore, Leverett told WaPo in this article that: "Clarke's critique of administration decision-making and how it did not balance the imperative of finishing the job against al Qaeda versus what they wanted to do in Iraq is absolutely on the money."


Oops.