Book Review: Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke

In 2004, Richard Clarke did something that a civil servant, bureaucrat, or politician never does. He admitted a fault. He testified before the 9/11 Commission that “your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn’t matter because we failed.” (Clarke, Appendix A). The nation’s anti-terrorism efforts didn’t have to fail, but they clearly did. In Against All Enemies, Clarke tells us how and why they failed.

The stage is set by Clarke’s insider’s description of the events of September 11th, 2001. We get the story from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Clarke was the head of counterterrorism in the White House, and he was at the center of the government’s response after the tragedy. He lays out both the heroism and the mistakes of government agents and officials, painting a vivid and very honest picture of an Administration that was unprepared, and individuals who stepped up and acted above and beyond their duty.

The fight against al Qaeda began during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The nation’s security apparatus was slow to detect and identify the existence of al Qaeda as a threat to peace and stability around the world. Though our intelligence on Usama bin Laden’s organization was woefully lax in the early days, once Clinton became aware of the problem, his leadership and attention to details took over. It is fair to say that Bill Clinton was obsessed with capturing or killing bin Laden during his last four years in office.

Within the Clinton administration, there were a handful of agents who understood the danger of al Qaeda and constantly pressed the issue with the various responsible agencies. The federal government worked about how you would expect it to. It was slow, there were turf wars, interagency cooperation was minimal, and nobody wanted to risk their careers or budgets on an uncertain threat. Even the urging of the President of the United States wasn’t enough to get some agencies to budge. Clinton was trying to bring intelligence, security, and military agencies out of the Cold War and into the modern era of non-governmental threats. Some parties refused to come along peacefully.

The theme that emerges throughout the book is the contrast between the Clinton administration and the incoming George W. Bush administration. The Bush appointees seemed to feel like the Clinton years were a short hiccup in history, and they would just pick up where they left off after Bush I. Clarke and his colleagues had worked tirelessly to create a system for tracking and suspending finances that were linked to terror organizations. That all changed with Bush took office. Clarke writes: “In general, the Bush appointees distrusted anything invented by the Clinton administration and anything of a multilateral nature—so the international terrorist financing effort had two strikes against it.” (pg. 196)

I sometimes caution my friends on the left that the right wingers are not the mindless, power-grabbing automatons they sometimes appear to be. They really believe their own rhetoric, as difficult as that is for liberals to understand. They really think they’ve got it right, and everybody else has it wrong, and they had better attain and keep power so that goodness and rightness can prevail. Neocons tend to filter incoming facts through their political prejudices, and mistake this for real analysis. Not only that, they believe that liberals do the same thing. This accounts for the incorrect and sometimes bizarre conservative indictments against liberals. This mindset is apparent in the Bush administrations decision-making after 9/11.

Iraq has been the bugaboo of neocons since 1991, when George Bush, Sr. failed to do the macho thing and destroy Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. They imagined threat of Hussein has been repeated in conservative media, not just because Republicans were trying to sell it as a campaign point, but because they actually believed it. It is no wonder that Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and sometimes even Bush himself, pressed Clarke to find a link between the terrorist attacks and the Iraq government. “At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than al Qaeda. Then I realized… that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.” (pg. 30)

When you read the sections that take place during the Clinton administration, it’s all “bin Laden, bin Laden, bin Laden.” Later, when Bush takes over, it’s all “Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.” Is this an accurate picture? There have been other former members of the Bush administration who corroborate the story, but it is always possible that there as more going on of which Clarke and other critics were not aware. If so, it is difficult to find the evidence. By all accounts, Bush and his friends wanted to do something about Iraq from the very beginning, even before the al Qaeda attacks. Wolfowitz appears to have been the point man in the invade-Iraq campaign. He bought into a crackpot conspiracy theory by Laurie Mylroie that supposedly connected Iraq to the first World Trade Center attack. Wolfowitz even went so far as to send James Woolsey to the UK to find evidence to support the wild theory. (pg. 95) As you might expect, no such evidence turned up.

Clarke dedicates his last chapter to discussing, comparing, and contrasting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He paints no rosy picture of Afghanistan, pointing out some major errors in strategy that reduced the chances of capturing or killing bin Laden. Not enough resources were dedicated to the Afghanistan effort, and it didn’t take long before even those meager resources were cut to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. This chapter is a clear and thorough indictment of the Iraq war. It recounts everything we have lost by invading Iraq. It is not just about the loss of money and life, it is also about the lost opportunities, the incitement of anti-Americanism that strengthens al Qaeda, and the diminution of American prestige and support among our allies.

There are some conclusions that can be drawn from Clarke’s account. First, Bill Clinton had a totally different approach to decision-making than George W. Bush. Clinton was hands-on, and was capable of studying and understanding the deepest nuances of complex problems. Bush “looked for the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem.” (pg. 243) Second, al Qaeda was a known threat before September 11th, 2001. Clinton tried to tackle the problem without rousing fear in the population. Bush ignored the problem, instead preoccupied with Iraq. Once the danger became very real, fear was the primary tool Bush used to gain support for the new war on terror. Third, though their choices are sometimes tragically bad, most of the officials tasked with protecting America really do care about the country, and try to do the right thing. Wolfowitz was wrong about the conspiracy theory, but he really believed he was going after a threat to the United States. That was his job, though he may have performed it incompetently.

If a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, I wonder if Richard Clarke will play a role in the new administration. It would be understandable if he did not. He can retire and leave the hard and thankless work to others. On the other hand, he is very intelligent, experienced in counterterrorism, and tends to be right more often than he is wrong. Sounds like just the person you would want in charge of protecting the United States from hidden threats around the world.

© 2008 Bryan Lower

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