| Review: Richard A. Clarke, AGAINST ALL ENEMIES |
| I talked to a young woman I know quite well last week.
It happened to be right after watching The News
Hour and their listing of military casualties in Iraq. I think
there were eleven pictures shown with accompanying information: name,
age, home town. They were all male. Some looked as though they had
just started shaving. Others were old enough to have left wives and
children. “What a mess Iraq has become,” I said. “Yes,” the young woman agreed, “it is a mess. But what else could we do? I mean, he wouldn’t give that guy up.” “What guy?” I asked. “You know. bin Laden.” “You’re talking about Sadam Hussein?” I said. “You’re saying he wouldn’t give bin Laden up?” “Yes.” I was speechless for a second. “Hussein never had bin Laden.” “He didn’t?” she said, “are you sure?” And when I said I certainly was, she wondered… “How did I ever get that idea?” And so the conversation went on, and she was sufficiently disturbed about her misinformation to decide to ask the other seven people in her office the following question the next day: Why are we in Iraq? It turned out that six had an answer similar to hers. “Because they flew planes into our buildings. Because they were going to nuke us. Because Hussein and bin Laden are out to get us." One person said it was because of George Bush’s desire to get even with Hussein over the attempted assassination of Bush Sr. and for oil. It was enough to drive me to the books. All those books. Paul O’Neill’s The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind; The Great Unraveling by Paul Krugman; Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward; Big Lies by Joe Conason; Worse Than Watergate by John Dean; American Dynasty by Kevin Phillips; Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken; Disarming Iraq by Hans Blix; and Against All Enemies by Richard A. Clarke. I was drawn to Bob Woodward, but a friend offered to loan me a copy of Clarke’s Against All Enemies. I expected something dry. I’ve always preferred fiction. But I’m also a news junkie, and this is a story of where we were, where we are, and where we’re probably headed by a man who lived at the center of one of the most important catastrophes to have hit the United States since 1941. Fascinating. As I perceived him on CNN during the 9/11 hearings, Clarke is a precise, careful, measured man. His prose is generally restrained. His main intention seems the setting straight of the record. Up front, he qualifies his story as the viewpoint of one man. But this is a man with 30 years experience in Washington, ten of those in the White House under presidents of both parties. He was in on everything, had knowledge of everybody, had his finger on the pulse of some of the most sensitive organizations in Washington, and had been there long enough to know intimately every glory, wart, and pimple. He is not above giving zings to those he feels deserve it. Lynn Cheney takes a first hit on page 18. Out of 291 pages, the last 66 are reserved for George Bush et al, and one comes away with not just a sense, but a conviction, that our country is being ordered by the gang who can’t shoot straight. Addressing general, non-partisan concerns, the first issue that struck me was the fact that an agency called into existence to fulfill a mission rapidly evolves into an entity obsessed with its own survival. It performs its mission, yes, but always with an agenda that weighs its own continued existence along with its performance—a practice that inhibits ingenuity, resourcefulness, and, often, cooperation. The second issue involves inertia. Something most people, and, thus, the agencies they create are hobbled by. Those who think outside the box, who see largely, who are willing to ponder other more effective ways of doing things and are not afraid to implement them often meet with reluctance and outright obstruction. The third thing that struck me was the idiocy of a government that changes all its parts every four or eight years. ‘Cleaning house’ was the way the Bush administration described it, but where’s the sense in ejecting every department head just at the point where they’ve come to know and understand their job so a new bunch can come in and be totally ineffective for a lengthy period of time? There are certain crucial elements of operation that should be immune to partisan appointment, that should not fall under the unpredictabilities of presidential whim. Clarke came to Washington under the Reagan administration. His field was defense—intelligence, security, and, eventually, terrorism. He served under Reagan, Bush Sr., under Clinton, and under the current president. I don’t know if he’s a republican or a democrat. Clinton comes off well in his book. Clarke refutes many myths about him—that he ignored the threat of terrorism, that his order to bomb facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 were merely to counter the Monica scandal, that it was Clinton who dragged his feet on issuing orders directing the military to engage in anti-terrorist commando operations, that it was his failure alone in Somalia. He lauds Clinton for identifying terrorism as the major post-Cold War threat; for acting to improve U.S. counterterrorism capabilities; for quashing anti-American terrorism by Iraq and Iran; for defeating an al Qaeda attempt to take over Bosnia; for imposing sanctions on al Qaeda; for taking terrorism seriously enough to harden embassies, propose monies for creating new defenses against new weapons of terror, for insisting that U.S. agencies improve their response to attack; for enabling heightened security that stopped two attacks planned for the Millennium; and for putting in place plans and programs allowing suitable US response to the attacks on 9/11. Studying the course of events as Clarke addressed them during the Clinton administration, one comes to view the Lewinsky scandal not only as stupid and needless, but as an American tragedy. Something that stole public and media attention from the real business of the country and scuttled the accomplishments of many. At the same time, knowing now the rising terror the United States was facing and needed to address at that time, the book is a reminder of the republican response to the Lewinsky affair—unrelenting, rabid, a form of terrorism in its own right. Al Gore comes off particularly well. Intelligent, sharp, decisive, articulate. It makes one wonder where we might be today if voting in Florida hadn’t derailed. George Bush, on the other hand, does not fare well in this book. Neither does Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, or Rumsfeld. That Clinton’s concern with al Qaeda was viewed as an obsession by the Bush administration; that White House focus was squarely on Iraq well before and on the morning of September 12, 2001; that Iraq policy seemed partly based on a disproved theory set forth by an American Enterprise Institute adjunct fellow who insisted that the real Ramzi Yousef was not in federal prison but in Baghdad with Saddam Hussein; that according to Clarke the war in Iraq is a mistake that plays exactly into what bin Laden would have wanted—that the United States would occupy an oil-rich Islamic country and foment anti-American feelings world wide; that Afghanistan, the true harbor of al Qaeda, has been undercut in favor of the war in Iraq…all these things are, or at least should be, of grave concern. Is Clarke accurate when he says, “The nation needed thoughtful leadership to deal with the underlying problems September 11 reflected: a radical deviant Islamist ideology on the rise, real security vulnerabilities in the highly integrated global civilization. Instead, America got unthinking reactions, ham-handed responses, and a rejection of analysis in favor of received wisdom. It has left us less secure. We will pay the price for a long time.” It’s a consistent accusation in book after book. Can they all be wrong?
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