Aha! The other shoe is falling. As annoying as it is to have Junior claim the mantle of 9/11 savior, it's the Iraq charge that has more substance. Now, for the first time this week I can remember, it's getting some SCLM play.
WaPo
John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the 9/11 commission, put it bluntly to former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke when he testified publicly last week: Why did his earlier, private testimony to the commission not include the harsh criticism leveled at President Bush in his book?
"There's a very good reason for that," Clarke replied. "In the 15 hours of testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq. And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."
The furious charge and countercharge between Clarke and the White House last week has largely obscured this central complaint by Clarke. The commission investigating the 2001 attacks is not charged with probing this question, so little of the public testimony in recent days dwelled on Iraq. Politically, however, it is potentially just as important for Bush to deal with that assertion as it is for him to address the claim that he was not properly focused on the al Qaeda threat in the first eight months of his presidency.