Joan Swirsky
Friday, March 26, 2004

But the bigness of the ego – which is another word for the “self” – is measured not by how one subjectively assesses his own qualities and strengths, but by the ways in which his behavior is perceived and interpreted by the outside world.

By that measure, bureaucrat Clarke has a puny ego, a diminished sense of self that he amply demonstrated this week by going public to reveal not the character, humility, integrity and fearless decisiveness of a big-ego guy but rather qualities of which pathetically inadequate egos are comprised: cowardice, vengefulness and dishonesty.

Clarke’s cowardicecan be seen in the publication of his book last week, exquisitely timed to coincide with the presidential campaign.

Like the 98-pound weakling who depends on his bodybuilder brother to fight his battles, Clarke counted on the Bush-bashing Greek chorus of media shills – Stahl, Rather, Jennings, Brokaw, the New York Times, Newsday; the list of echo-chamber voices goes on and on – to bolster his “theory” that President Bush did little to combat terrorism before Sept. 11.

But no sooner had this egregious charge been leveled than Fox News aired a tape on which Clarke, himself, stated: “The Bush administration decided ... mid-January [2001] to ... vigorously pursue the existing [Clinton] policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings ... to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided. ...”

And, in the spring before 9/11, “... to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, fivefold, to go after al-Qaida.”

Guys with puny egos, like three-card Monte dealers, can’t stand it when their pretenses are exposed!

Clarke’s vengefulness is equally clear. The guy was demoted! After enjoying the status of go-to expert on counterterrorism during the Clinton administration (and we all know how effective they were!), Clarke was kept on by the Bush team until his so-called talents were found lacking and he was downgraded from his position on the National Security Council and – charitably, it seems clear – assigned to be coordinator for cyberterrorism.

Guys with puny egos, like emperors with no clothes, don’t take lightly to being called naked!

Clarke’s dishonesty is rife, not only in his book but also before the 9/11 Commission. After insisting that President Bush was slow to respond to the terrorist threat, he must have forgotten about previous testimony in which he stated: “President Bush told us in March [2001] to stop swatting at flies and just solve this problem ... that was the strategic direction that changed the National Security Presidential Directive [of Clinton’s] from one of rollback to one of elimination.” When asked if, in fact, the Bush administration made the only changes in fighting terrorism since October of 1998, Clarke replied: “You got it. That's right. ...”

Guys with puny egos, like admirers of Bill Clinton and his ilk, never encounter a distortion of the truth they don’t embrace!

Clarke has said that he was “intimidated” by the president into finding a link between Iraq and Al-Qaida. I believe this!

After working in the Clinton White House for eight years as national coordinator for counterterrorism, Clarke was clearly accustomed to the good-ol'-boy atmosphere that prevailed there, where providing information to the people who did nothing about it was enough for him, in spite of his occasional and amazingly ineffectual protestations.

As terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and subsequently the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and the USS Cole in Yemen, Clarke never took pen to paper to write that the good-ol'-boy-in-chief “ignored” Al-Qaida!

That is because guys with puny egos are often so intoxicated by proximity to power that, as long as they’re “on board,” they rarely squeak in protest.

But when Clarke found himself in the company of President Bush, a leader with a genuinely big ego (character, humility, integrity and fearless decisiveness), a leader and the advisers he had chosen and not “kept on,” the bumbling bureaucrat was intimidated!

And not because the president told him to find an Al-Qaida-Iraq link – Clarke reluctantly admitted that he had not been told by the president to "make it up."

Rather, he was intimidated because that’s what guys with puny egos experience in the presence of people who see through them and challenge them and, ultimately, demote them.

The inevitable result: extreme humiliation and burning rage, hence Clarke’s book (empirically false accusations and all) and his appearance before the 9/11 Commission.

Clarke’s humiliation is easy to understand. In the entire eight years he served and “advised” the Clinton administration, Afghanistan was not deloused of the Taliban, Iraq was not liberated from decades of brutal tyranny, Libya nevercapitulated to U.S. demands to renounce and abandon its weapons of mass destruction, Pakistan was never as cooperative an ally, North Korea was never closer to engaging in non-proliferation talks with its neighbors, and Iran and Syria were never more afraid of being the next target in our urgent war on terrorism.

Now that’s a record to be humiliated about!

As for Clarke’s rage, it’s all there in black and white for the ingestion (and indigestion) of gullible readers, as is his testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

Hell truly hath no fury like a puny-ego guy scorned!

Joan Swirsky is a New-York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com.

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