Richard Clarke: Cuba not a state sponsor of terror
By
Patrick Doherty Read Spanish Version
Taken
from the Havana Note blog
As
Congress comes to grips with the magnitude and political implications
of the devastation across Cuba from Hurricanes Fay, Gustav and Ike —
it is vitally important to make sure that Washington understands
something Cuba is
not.
Cuba
is not a state sponsor of terrorism and hasn’t been at least since
the Clinton Administration conducted a formal review of the list in
the late 1990s.
Unfortunately
— according to Richard Clarke, who was the U.S. Government’s
coordinator for counterterrorism in both the Clinton and Bush 43
administrations — domestic politics intervened and kept Cuba on the
list.
Last
month, I conducted a fascinating interview with Richard Clarke at his
office in Virginia. Clarke will be remembered as the man who
repeatedly warned President Bush and his boss, then-National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, that al-Qaeda was about to strike. His most
recent book, Your
Government Failed You,
talks about how our national security community is broken and what
can be done to fix it.
Domestic
politics, not national security
For
Clarke, current U.S. policy toward Cuba is "a demonstrable
failure." As a national security practitioner, Clarke believes
policy needs to be made based on a cool-headed assessment of the
situation, a transparent calculation of our interests, and it must
consider the fullest range of our policy options. This policy
calculation has not happened for Cuba, and he thinks it must.
Clarke
is clear, of course, that Cuba was a real security threat to the
United States. In the 1960s the Soviets were stationing missiles,
bombers and troops on this island only 90 miles from the Southern tip
of Florida. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba was exporting soldiers, arms
and communist revolution. But after the return of Cuba’s troops and
the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba stopped being the same kind of
threat to U.S. interests. "They are a national security
problem," he told me, "but nowhere near what they were."
Yet
our policy did not change to reflect the new calculation. Here, [You
Tube video] I ask him why:
Clarke
is in good company. Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to
presidents Ford and Bush-41 told my colleague Steve Clemons
essentially the same thing. Said Scowcroft,
"My
answer on Cuba is Cuba is not a foreign policy question. Cuba is a
domestic issue. In foreign policy, the embargo makes no sense. It
doesn’t do anything. It’s quite clear we can not starve Cuba to
death. We learned that when the Soviet stopped subsidizing Cuba and
they didn’t collapse. It’s a domestic issue."
In
1994, in his last book, Richard Nixon assessed America’s Cuba policy,
our interests and our options argued that America’s relationship with
Cuba needed a change. Serving on the NSC during at the same time in
the 1990s, Clarke watched as the U.S. opened up relations with 20+
former Soviet satellites, but not Cuba. We built economic, political,
and cultural ties across the board and for the most part, Clarke
believes, it was successful. But Cuba was always isolated. That, he
told me, was a mistake.
State
sponsors of terrorism list
Supporters
of the embargo often cite Cuba’s listing on the State Department’s
State Sponsors of Terrorism List as evidence that Cuba remains a
threat. In my interview, Clarke talked extensively about that list.
It was always supposed to be a tool of policy, which meant nations
had to have a way to get off the list, by doing the right thing. But
in Cuba’s case, that was not going to happen. In the late 1990s,
Clarke oversaw a review of all the nations on that list and
determined that Cuba should not be on it.
Here’s
the clip [You Tube]:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yozA5QCKMOk
Pro-embargo
supporters will continue to argue that the fact that Cuba remains on
the State Sponsors of Terror List is evidence that the United States
should maintain a hard line with Cuba, even after the devastation
wrought by this year’s hurricane season.
Now
Cuba’s presence on that list has been discredited as the bi-partisan
result of domestic politics. It’s not about Cuba, it’s about
Florida’s 27 electoral votes.
The
following is a transcript of the two videos above.
Clip
1:
Doherty:
…Cuba [policy] has suffered for many years, from a bipartisan
consensus that Cuba policy will be generated in the political sphere…
Clarke:
Yup, I think Cuba’s a really good example because whether it’s a
democrat, Bill Clinton in the white house or George Bush in the white
house — one or two — Cuba was a third rail issue, which meant you
couldn’t touch it. It was electric.
It
wasn’t really a national security issue, it was a political issue
and specifically it was a Florida issue. How could we, whether it was
bill Clinton or George Bush, how could we win Florida in the next
presidential election; how could we pick up those two, three, or four
congressional districts that are dominated by Cuban Americans. And
every aspect of what should be a national security issue decided
analytically on the merits of what’s in the U.S. national interest,
was run through the filter of politics
Clip
2:
Clarke:
Then you look at Cuba and the reason in the 1990’s, in the late
1990’s, why we didn’t take Cuba off the list was not because they
were sponsoring terrorism.
Doherty:
Why was it?
Clarke:
It was because U.S. domestic political reasons. Factually,
objectively, they are no longer sponsoring terrorism. So should they
be taken off the list? Perhaps. In the context — as with Libya, as
with North Korea — in the context of a bilateral negotiation, that
is larger than just the issue of terrorism.
http://thehavananote.com/2008/09/richard_clarke_cuba_not_a_stat_1.html
