From the Wall Street Journal....
Rice on the Record
Democrats on the 9/11 Commission inadvertently underscore Bush's successes.
Friday, April 9, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
We predicted yesterday's Condoleezza Rice show would be more about the 9/11 Commissioners themselves than anything the National Security Adviser had to say. But we confess we were unprepared for Bob Kerrey's Vice Presidential audition.
We thought the former Senator had more class than to preface his remarks with a condescending allusion to the fact that Ms. Rice is a black woman. ("I'm very impressed . . . [by] the story of your life.") Or to then complain that her attempts to answer his monologue were cutting into his time. In their zeal to show all the things that went undone before 9/11, Mr. Kerrey and other Democrats on the Commission inadvertently underscored all that President Bush has done since. Think of it as one long endorsement of pre-emption.
One genuinely interesting news nugget came in Ms. Rice's opening statement. There she gave details of the Bush Administration's first major national security directive, completed September 4, 2001. It covered "not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaeda." Obviously this didn't prevent the events of a week later. But it does suggest, contra Richard Clarke, that the Administration was attentive to the terrorist threat.
Mr. Kerrey and his fellow partisans made much of an August 6, 2001, Presidential briefing titled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside United States." But Ms. Rice properly observed that there is no obvious response to non-specific warnings that "something very big may happen." She likewise dismissed Democratic insinuations of a bureaucratic "silver bullet," such as dealing with issues at the "principals" level: Unlike his predecessor, President Bush was already conferring with his Director of Central Intelligence on a daily basis.
The major problems that existed pre-9/11 weren't management issues but longstanding policies that required Presidential leadership and in some cases acts of Congress to change. One such policy, Ms. Rice noted, was our approach to Pakistan, which the Clinton Administration had been sanctioning at the cost of harming our ability to tackle the Taliban. The Bush Administration's embrace of General Musharraf is vulnerable to criticism, but there can be no question that in the larger war on terror it has paid big dividends--most recently with the exposure of the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network.
In another arena Ms. Rice might have blamed Democrats of the John Kerry stripe for another barrier to effective counterterrorism. Instead, she politely limited herself to pointing out the 1970s-era laws forbidding information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement officials. It was only the much reviled Patriot Act that finally changed that.
There were, finally, an alarming number of lacunae in immigration policy and aviation security, underscored in questioning by former Navy Secretary John Lehman. Fingerprinting visitors, hardening cockpit doors, and arming pilots are among the steps now being taken to close these holes.
The key point here is that a 9/11 Commission interested in making a lasting contribution to U.S. security ought to be focusing on the need for pro-active policies at home and abroad rather than obsessing over the level of "urgency" within the pre-9/11 Bush Administration. "My greatest concern," Ms. Rice noted, "is that as September 11 recedes from memory, that we will begin to unlearn the lessons." Judging from yesterday's hearing, some people already have.