Bush vs. U.S.(on the right)(Richard Clarke)

NEW YORK, MARCH 30

THE response given to Richard Clarke's apology for 9/11 is instructive. We assume he was sincere in tendering it, and, manifestly, the family members of the victims were sincere in their appreciation. Granting all that, we need to analyze the event for its implications.

One apologizes for one's own misdeeds. One can apologize, also, for the misdeeds of a group of which one is a member. Indeed, for a civilization of which one is one part. But in order to be credible, one has to have standing. The Pope can apologize for past episodes of Christian anti-Semitism, but a lonely priest doing so brings on attention not to medieval Church practices, but rather to himself. The psychological term is grandiosity: a self-exaltation that subordinates the major question.

Clarke's apology was not on the scale of sheer presumption, because he had a very direct role in the counterterrorist organization. But he was not apologizing for his own failure. Rather, Mr. Clarke has been apologizing for improper emphases by the Bush administration in response to the al-Qaeda threat. One recalls that on 60 Minutes Mr. Clarke summoned up the terrorist bound for Los Angeles to bomb the airport, but apprehended by authorities owing, Clarke suggested, to the kind of priority given, in the late '90s, to potential terrorist activity. He was saying that President Bush's failure to assign appropriate priority to al-Qaeda was responsible for latitudinarian counterterrorist activity.

But the historical plot thickens. Former secretary of state George P. Shultz, in a lecture at the Library of Congress, traced the events in Iraq that led to war, pausing over the year 1998 when ...