Clinton and Bush Camps at War Over Lead-up to 9/11

An unspoken entente cordiale between the Bush and Clinton administrations to avoid assigning blame for the 9/11 attacks came to an abrupt end yesterday as officials from both eras exchanged angry recriminations.

After five years of relative civility over which president bore greater responsibility for security lapses leading up to the attacks, George Bush and Bill Clinton yesterday were engaged in a no-holds-barred battle for their respective legacies, assisted by their secretaries of state.

The exchanges arrived in the throes of a campaign for mid-term elections in which the main issues are the war in Iraq and the fight against al-Qaida. Mr Bush is also under fire after a leaked intelligence report said the US invasion of Iraq had spurred Islamist militancy.

Yesterday Mr Bush responded to a rare outburst from Mr Clinton that he was preoccupied with the war in Iraq by saying that it was a mistake to think that the invasion had fuelled terrorism. "I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offence against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe," Mr Bush told a press conference at the White House.

In New York his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, accused the Clinton administration of failing to leave a plan for fighting al-Qaida. But a few blocks away from the White House Ms Rice's Clinton-era predecessor, Madeleine Albright, was accusing Mr Bush of adopting damaging policies because of his strong beliefs.

"If certainties such as the war in Iraq and the axis of evil are based on a religious belief that God is on our side - versus we should be on God's side as Lincoln said - then certitude creates foreign policy problems," Ms Albright told the Council on Foreign Relations. "The certitude with which the war was looked at does not allow for a plan B ... the certitude that is still being exhibited by this administration by it constantly asserting that this is right is not helping."

She lambasted Mr Bush for his refusal to open talks with Iran on its nuclear programme, saying: "We used to talk to Stalin and Mao so that is the craziness of this."

The informal truce began unravelling this month when a controversial ABC docu-drama aired portraying Clinton-era officials as being unconcerned about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

Democrats denounced the programme, forcing the network to make changes, but Mr Clinton reserved his full wrath for last weekend when he told Fox television he had done more than Mr Bush to try to kill Bin Laden. "That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now," he said. "They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try, they did not try."

He accused his interviewer of taking part in a "conservative hit job" and criticised the Bush administration for assigning seven times as many troops to Iraq as Afghanistan.

In an interview published in yesterday's New York Post Ms Rice said the Bush administration had waged a battle against al-Qaida in the months before the 9/11 attacks that was "at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years ... the notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn't do that is just flatly false."