Tax cuts and Iraq were Bush's highest priority.

I won't go into too much detail about Richard Clarke, simply because I don't have time to read his book and watch cable news 24/7 in order to find out who is accusing whom of what. I think everyone is pretty clear that some of the charges leveled by Clarke in his book and his 9/11 commission testimony eerily echo those raised by our own Wes Clark during his campaign: that the Bush team put terrorism on a backburner when they came to office, and that their invasion of Iraq was a costly and unnecessary diversion from the real war on terrorism. I also think Clarke makes an extremely valid point when he says that 9/11 presented a unique opportunity for us vis a vis state-sponsored terrorism. Not only was there a tremendous outpouring of international sympathy for the US after 9/11, but a lot of Arab dictatorships, as well as a number of average people on the street, decided that the Islamist radicalism had gone too far. By invading Iraq, we've only inflamed that radicalism, creating, as Hosni Mubarak forewarned, a hundred bin Ladens. Anyway, Soviet expert Condi Rice, the formerly well-regarded Colin Powell, and the petulant Don Rumsfeld have been vehemently defending the administration, insisting that terrorism was by no means on the back-burner or otherwise not a top priority during Bush's administration from January 2001 - September 2001. Calpundit finds these interesting non-Clarke tidbits from various sources to counter these latest weak attempts to defend inaction: The Washington Monthly: "General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff: the Bush administration pushed terrorism 'farther to the back burner.' Bush administration terrorism report, April 2001, via CNN: When asked why the Administration had reduced the focus on Osama bin Laden, 'a senior Bush State Department official told CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden.' Thomas Maertens, NSC nonproliferation director for Clinton and Bush: '[Clarke] was the guy pushing hardest, saying again and again that something big was going to happen, including possibly here in the U.S.' But Maertens said the Bush White House was reluctant to believe a holdover from the previous administration. 'They really believed their campaign rhetoric about the Clinton administration,' he said. 'So anything they did was bad, and the Bushies were not going to repeat it.' Lieutenant General Don Kerrick, Clinton deputy NSA who was held over for several months by Bush, comparing Bush's sense of urgency regarding terrorism to Clinton's: 'Candidly speaking, I didn't detect that kind of focus.' And this: 'I don't think it was above the waterline. They were gambling nothing would happen.' President Bush himself, quoted by Bob Woodward: 'I didn't feel a sense of urgency about al Qaeda. It was not my focus; it was not the focus of my team.'"