Rock, Paper, Schism

If the spat between Richard Clarke and the White House gets anymore childish they'll be breaking each others' crayons and lobbing poopy-head around. The relevant, important stuff is simple enough, yet easily obscured by all the invective.

Clarke, warts and all, simply stands for all the counter-terror people inside the federal government who thought the U.S. should not invade Iraq, who thought there were other, better options to combat terrorism. Hence President Bush did not have to invade Iraq to fight terror. His top aides evidently thought invading Iraq was the best way to fight terror. They may yet be proven right.

But it is time to bury the fiction that the choice was between invading Iraq and doing nothing.