Look At Me! I'm Important Too!
Perhaps Richard Clarke wasn't as prescient as he claims. At least that was what Security Focus columnist George Smith suggested just over a year ago:
Years ago, Clarke bet his national security career on the idea that electronic war was going to be real war. He lost, because as al Qaeda and Iraq have shown, real action is still of the blood and guts kind.
In happier times prior to 9/11, Clarke -- as Bill Clinton's counter-terror point man in the National Security Council -- devoted great effort to convincing national movers and shakers that cyberattack was the coming thing. While ostensibly involved in preparations for bioterrorism and trying to sound alarms about Osama bin Laden, Clarke was most often seen in the news predicting ways in which electronic attacks were going to change everything and rewrite the calculus of conflict.
September 11 spoiled the fun, though, and electronic attack was shoved onto the back-burner in favor of special operations men calling in B-52 precision air strikes on Taliban losers. One-hundred fifty-thousand U.S. soldiers on station outside Iraq make it perfectly clear that cyberspace is only a trivial distraction.
It looks to me that Clarke is simply a bitter little man who feels slighted not only by the current administration, which was responsible for his demotion, but also by previous administrations which never seemed to take his arm waving and alarm blowing about cyberterrorism quite as seriously as they tended to look at the more physical forms of terror.
He resents the fact that his predictions were so off the mark as well as the fact that the real face of terrorism made his dire warnings, and himself, seem almost irrelevant. He's now desperately seeking that relevance by trashing the Bush administration and has been greeted with open arms by the media that shamelessly embodies this goal.
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