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I’ve been pretty silent during the entire Richard Clarke affair and now the appearance of Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 commission. It’s been pretty dramatic as political stories go - and one in which the more melodramatic developments and partisan rancor are completely unseparable from real, substantial issues of American foreign policy - its past transformation over the recent past and the direction it should take in the future. But I’ve not really had anything all that new or insightful to add to the discussion, particuarly given the excellent blogging by the likes of Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias, among others.

I may try to summarize my thoughts on the foreign policy issues at stake at a future point, but for now, let me emphasize that there seem to be three strands to the 9/11 Commission as it’s being played out in the media, one useful, one partly useful and one congressional grandstanding on the part of Democrats. Let me take them in reverse order. The least helpful part is the notion that the Bush administration had every power to prevent 9/11 but didn’t and therefore should be blamed for this. Now, it may come to pass that evidence shows some real negligence beyond a culture of neglect through insincere anti-terrorism efforts pre-9/11. But barring that, we should just concede that hindsight is 20/20 and that to pin direct blame on the administration is not ultimately all that fair.

The second strand, the utter Nixonianism of the Bush administration in stonewalling the commission and selectively releasing classified documents, is a fair charge. But to focus solely on slimy political tactics and lack of democratic accountability is being too easy on the neoconservatives and their apologists. After all, it’s possible that one can be a strong-armer and deceptive and yet still be ultimately right about one’s views of foreign policy. And while the shenanigans should give even conservatives pause, the Plame affair has shown that one’s view of political tactics will vary according to one’s view of the political content. (Instapundit’s professed incomprehension at the Plame scandal was beyond me - I watched the whole two-hour Frontline on Whitewater and still couldn’t follow that scandal, but this one was pretty straightforward: administration uses classified information to intimidate and smear critic by outing his wife and ruining her career).

So, ultimately, the critique that’s coming out during the commission’s hearings - it’s a critique that’s been around all the time, but which the media and the public didn’t want to entertain earlier - is that a blind ideology led the administration to have the wrong priorities before 9/11 and made it unwilling to adapt its priorities afterward and even now. Take missile defense. It was a folly of an idea to begin with, as critics tried to point out at the time. Take Robert Wright’s argument (in April of 2000) against the Bush proposal for an MDS:

1) As for terrorists: Suppose you’re a terrorist and you want to nuke an American city. You’ve got the resources to build a bomb, and the question is how to deliver it: a) covertly build or acquire an expensive, complicated, and inherently unreliable missile that would in theory let you deliver your payload precisely; b) sneak the bomb across the border (by, say, concealing it in a van full of illegal immigrants), park it in a midtown garage, set the timer, then catch a cab to La Guardia. Duh.

2) As for “rogue states”: Suppose you’re a rogue dictator. Suppose that you want to nuke an American city and would just as soon avoid the discomfort of utter retaliatory annihilation. You are trying to decide between two options: a) put a return address on your nuke—i.e., deliver it via a missile launched from your soil; b) use the van method outlined above. Duh.

Abandoning missile-defense may well have not mattered in the prevention of the specific event of the World Trade Center attack. But by now the liberal nay-sayers like Wright come off as fairly prescient. Our greatest threats now seem to be asymmetrical ones - ones without return addresses. Instead of taking time to say, well maybe our priorities were misguided, the neocons squelched any criticism and forged ahead with their fixation on rogue states. What’s unifying the liberal-left critique (different from the solid-left “Justice through Peace” mish-mash) is a thorough demonstration how adherence to a misguided ideology has been a pattern stretching across several platforms of foreign and domestic policy. The ultimate electoral success of the Democrats may depend on Kerry and Co. being able to articulate this critique in a culturally and politically resonant fashion. With the criticism as smart and cutting as Josh Marshall and others have been able to give, who needs the congressional grandstanding?