The White House calls it Dick Clarke’s American grandstand. Partisans hear what they want to hear, see what’s convenient through their ideological prism.

Watching former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke testify before the commission that’s evaluating U.S. intelligence misfires leading to 9-11, one didn’t sense grandstanding. Frustration, yes. Humility, yes. A sense of what might have been, definitely, a pained, nostalgic yes.

“Your government failed you, and I failed you,” Clarke began his testimony, directed at 9-11 victims’ families. “We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask for your understanding and your forgiveness.”

Finally, an apology. Lost in the political battle over Clarke’s book taking George W. Bush to task for the president’s Saddam obsession and his mishandling of al-Qaida before 9-11 is the overriding importance of getting to the truth. Motivation counts.

Clarke may be a wise whistleblower or a disgruntled mass of political hot air. This much we know: The counterterrorism official’s new book buzzes with accusations about Bush’s motivations in Iraq and a decade of missed opportunities to nab Osama bin Laden before 9-11. Just as the commission charged with investigating 9-11 wraps up its work, Clarke’s explosive book charges the political atmosphere with blame in an election year.

The White House puts the blame squarely on Clarke’s bureaucratic shoulders. He was there under President Clinton, and what happened?

The first attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 1993; the U.S. embassies got hit in East Africa in 1998; the terrorist attack in 2000 on the USS Cole. On the attack, Vice President Dick Cheney went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show Tuesday to paint Clarke as a disgruntled bureaucrat with fuzzy hindsight.

“And the question that ought to be asked is, what were they (the Clinton administration) doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?” Cheney challenged.

Touche. Except the bipartisan commission’s findings shouldn’t turn into a partisan’s game of gotcha. That’s not in America’s best interest. The nation must insist on a thorough review of where the intelligence system failed. Instead, Bush administration officials are trying to defend the Patriot Act, as if past laws and not the intelligence agencies’ messed-up procedures were the problem.

Clarke raises strong points about the flaws in Bush’s war on terror strategy, but the Clinton White House didn’t shine either in the way it handled al-Qaida diplomatically, militarily or politically at home.

It’s amazing to me that CIA director George Tenet continues to hold on to the job despite the long list of intelligence breakdowns under his watch. Whether it was the CIA’s botched-up knowledge of al-Qaida operations in America and inability to act or to questions about the quality of CIA intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Tenet’s instincts have been wrong every time. Why is Bush keeping this Clinton holdover?

There were several missed opportunities, in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, to stop al-Qaida. It’s possible that even if the Bush White House had nabbed Osama bin Laden before 9-11, the terrorist strikes would have happened. The public likely would have blamed the White House for causing a retaliatory terrorist attack on the trade center and the Pentagon.

As it stands, Clarke’s not the first one to raise questions about Bush’s misfires — the missing WMD and the administration’s leaps of logic in trying to link al-Qaida’s religious zealotry with Iraq’s secular butcher Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, and others, such as Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatowski, have exposed the administration’s penchant for cherry-picking intelligence data.

So let’s stop pointing fingers and use the information from all parties, past and present, not to repeat mistakes. Ever.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about responsibility, about not failing America again. That’s the lesson we should take from Clarke’s apology. Any other lesson is tainted by politics.

Myriam Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Her e-mail address is mmarquez@orlandosentinel.com.