In his New Republic blog, Gregg Easterbook writes something that's surpassingly dumb:

Clarke now claims he knew after September 11 it would be a colossal mistake to pursue Al Qaeda and attack Iraq simultaneously. I asked, Why didn't he say so at the time? Clarke left government about a month before the assault on Iraq began. This means he had plenty of time to speak out, as a private citizen, against the Iraq attack--and at that moment, an antiwar statement by the president's own counterterrorism advisor would have had tremendous impact worldwide.

Yes, and we all know what great pains the Bush administration took to be responsive to world opinion in the weeks before the war started.

Easterbrook continues:

...on resigning from the National Security Council in February 2003, one month prior to the attack on Iraq, Clarke quickly signed as an on-air consultant to ABC News. During the month before the war, Clarke made several appearances on national television.... Clarke certainly wasn't holding his tongue, he was yakking nonstop. And yet by the most amazing and astonishing coincidence, Clarke apparently didn't mention any of the strongly-held antiwar views he has now suddenly remembered!

Easterbrook then quotes a Clarke appearance on ABC News from March 21, 2003, in which Peter Jennings says to Clarke, "Talk a bit about this targeting of Saddam" and Clarke, astonishingly, talks a bit about this targeting of Saddam. Apparently, by not flapping his arms and crying out, "The targeting of Saddam? I don't want to talk about the targeting of Saddam! Peter, I know that ABC hired me for my decades of experience in the area of counterterrorism, but it's morally wrong for me to do the job I was hired to do -- I'm going to talk about this ruinous war!," Clarke can now be seen as a fraud from the word go.

Not surprisingly, phony Democrat Mickey Kaus says in Slate that Easterbrook's observation is brilliant.