David Ignatius is always good on the Middle East; he's obviously a man who spends time thinking about the issues there. He is quite right to say that military and intelligence operations against Al-Qaeda are not enough. No matter how many insurgents we shoot and training camps we blow up, there are always more. The Middle East seems to generate more violent malcontents as it there were a factory somewhere producing them.
But I don't think Ignatius quite gets how unimportant the Arab-Israeli issue is in most of the Middle East. It's important, all right, but most Yemenis have concerns closer to home than Gaza or Hebron. Yemen has a lousy government which has never really integrated North Yemen and South Yemen into a coherent administration. Yemen is poor, very poor, in a region of oil-rich countries. Yemen's educational system may be worse than others in the Arab countries. So there is a continual flow of the undereducated, the overeducated but unemployed, the poorly educated and rootless, and those educated in all the wrong things by madrassahs and imams.
So, in addition to George Mitchell and Hillary Clinton spending some time working the Middle East, and beyond the arm-twisting President Obama needs to administer to Bibi Netanyahu and Abu Mazen, we need to be undertaking a broader effort to improve education, governance, civil society, and economic conditions in the countries of the Arab Middle East.
For a really good starting place for a discussion of these issues, try Kenneth Pollack's A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East. I read it last year, and now I have my own copy ($18.00 in trade paperback from Random House). In particular, read Part Two: The Problems of the Modern Middle East.) It consist of two powerful chapters on what is wrong in the Middle East. These are the problems that underly the issues we in the U.S. have been trying to deal with. In Pollack's view, we need to dig deeper, stay longer, and take a broader view. Sounds like work, doesn't it?
Glenn A Knight
In my study
Showing posts with label Al-Qaeda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Al-Qaeda. Show all posts
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Against All Enemies - A Review
Clarke, Richard A. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Free Press, 2004. xiii + 304 pages. Index. $27.00. ISBN: 0-7432-6024-4.
The opening chapter of Against All Enemies describes the scene at the White House during and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Fearing that another plane was aiming for Washington, the Secret Service ordered the building to be evacuated. Richard Clarke, the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism, and a few stalwart souls hang in there, monitoring events, calling upon the resources of other agencies, and generally managing the response to the disaster. This is what the permanent staff of the government does: They manage crises. The story makes a great set piece to lead off the book, and it establishes Richard Clarke’s credentials as a man at the center of events, respected by his colleagues, and in command of the reins of power.
Richard Clarke reached that eminence by serving in a series of posts in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House during a thirty-year civil service career. One of the characteristics that Mr. Clarke brought to these various posts was a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that appears to have arisen from his belief that professional military, intelligence, and diplomatic officers regarded civil servants as less accomplished, or less dedicated, than themselves. Mr. Clarke makes a point of noting that his hiring other civil servants when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs irritated the career Foreign Service personnel with whom he worked. He also makes a point of every petty bureaucratic battle he ever won.
The remainder of the book is both a history of the U.S. Government’s efforts to come to grips with terrorism, foreign and domestic, and an account of Mr. Clarke’s working life. Chapter 2, “Stumbling into the Islamic World,” reviews the experience of the Reagan administration, including the several disasters in Beirut, Lebanon, during that period. The chapter title conveys Mr. Clarke’s impression of the direction of our efforts in that part of the world. The chapter ends with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and apparent American victory which would eventually turn to ashes in our mouths.
In subsequent chapters Mr. Clarke reviews the first Bush administration’s experience with the Gulf War, which he refers to as “unfinished,” the rise of Islamic terrorism during the Clinton years, and the many threads that led to the discovery of Al Qaeda. This is in some ways the strongest part of Against All Enemies, as Mr. Clarke recounts how the investigations of apparently unrelated events led eventually to the realization that there was a single organization behind the World Trade Center attack of 1993, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the 1998 attacks on U.S. Embassies in Africa, and this strange Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden. This historical review ends, with Chapter 9, in the observation that the Bush administration found it rather odd that the Clinton people identified the elimination of bin Laden as one of the top national security priorities.
The chapter on “Before and After September 11,” in which Mr. Clarke critiques the Bush administrations counterterrorism efforts is probably the most quoted part of the book. After all, this is where he shows Bush’s national security team ignoring his many warnings about terrorism, and choosing to focus on missile defense and doing away with the ABM treaty. In fact, he concludes that there was very little chance, given the developments to date, that Bush could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. There might have been a chance for Clinton to have disrupted Al Qaeda enough to have prevented that kind of action, but, by January 20, 2001, the die was cast. As for the period after 9/11, Clarke characterizes the decision to invade Afghanistan as “plainly obvious,” but Bush’s efforts as “slow and small.” His assessment of the decision to invade Iraq – “Far from addressing the popular appeal of the enemy that attacked us, Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land.”
In the final chapter, “Right War, Wrong War,” Richard Clarke gives us his policy prescriptions for the dealing with terrorism. Rather, for dealing “with the fundamental problems revealed by the terrorist attacks.” Clarke’s three items are: “a massive effort to eliminate our vulnerabilities to terrorism at home,” “a concerted effort globally to counter the ideology of al Qaeda and the larger radical Islamic terrorist movement,” and to cooperate with other countries to “round up terrorists” and to “strengthen open governments and make it possible politically, economically, and socially for them to go after the roots of al Qaeda-like terrorism.” Which open governments? Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
One oddity that I need to mention here is that there is a point on which Richard A. Clarke and Doug Feith, the former Undersecretary for Policy in the Defense Department, agree. They both assert that the U.S. government has not developed an effective means to counter the ideological message of the Islamist movement. I might add that such a means, if we could develop and apply it, would make both turning America into a fortress, and rounding up terrorists overseas, unnecessary.
If you are interested in the origins of the September 11 attacks, and in the manner in which the U.S. government developed (or failed to develop) its counterterrorist policies, Against All Enemies is a good place to start.
The opening chapter of Against All Enemies describes the scene at the White House during and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Fearing that another plane was aiming for Washington, the Secret Service ordered the building to be evacuated. Richard Clarke, the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism, and a few stalwart souls hang in there, monitoring events, calling upon the resources of other agencies, and generally managing the response to the disaster. This is what the permanent staff of the government does: They manage crises. The story makes a great set piece to lead off the book, and it establishes Richard Clarke’s credentials as a man at the center of events, respected by his colleagues, and in command of the reins of power.
Richard Clarke reached that eminence by serving in a series of posts in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House during a thirty-year civil service career. One of the characteristics that Mr. Clarke brought to these various posts was a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that appears to have arisen from his belief that professional military, intelligence, and diplomatic officers regarded civil servants as less accomplished, or less dedicated, than themselves. Mr. Clarke makes a point of noting that his hiring other civil servants when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs irritated the career Foreign Service personnel with whom he worked. He also makes a point of every petty bureaucratic battle he ever won.
The remainder of the book is both a history of the U.S. Government’s efforts to come to grips with terrorism, foreign and domestic, and an account of Mr. Clarke’s working life. Chapter 2, “Stumbling into the Islamic World,” reviews the experience of the Reagan administration, including the several disasters in Beirut, Lebanon, during that period. The chapter title conveys Mr. Clarke’s impression of the direction of our efforts in that part of the world. The chapter ends with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and apparent American victory which would eventually turn to ashes in our mouths.
In subsequent chapters Mr. Clarke reviews the first Bush administration’s experience with the Gulf War, which he refers to as “unfinished,” the rise of Islamic terrorism during the Clinton years, and the many threads that led to the discovery of Al Qaeda. This is in some ways the strongest part of Against All Enemies, as Mr. Clarke recounts how the investigations of apparently unrelated events led eventually to the realization that there was a single organization behind the World Trade Center attack of 1993, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, the 1998 attacks on U.S. Embassies in Africa, and this strange Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden. This historical review ends, with Chapter 9, in the observation that the Bush administration found it rather odd that the Clinton people identified the elimination of bin Laden as one of the top national security priorities.
The chapter on “Before and After September 11,” in which Mr. Clarke critiques the Bush administrations counterterrorism efforts is probably the most quoted part of the book. After all, this is where he shows Bush’s national security team ignoring his many warnings about terrorism, and choosing to focus on missile defense and doing away with the ABM treaty. In fact, he concludes that there was very little chance, given the developments to date, that Bush could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. There might have been a chance for Clinton to have disrupted Al Qaeda enough to have prevented that kind of action, but, by January 20, 2001, the die was cast. As for the period after 9/11, Clarke characterizes the decision to invade Afghanistan as “plainly obvious,” but Bush’s efforts as “slow and small.” His assessment of the decision to invade Iraq – “Far from addressing the popular appeal of the enemy that attacked us, Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land.”
In the final chapter, “Right War, Wrong War,” Richard Clarke gives us his policy prescriptions for the dealing with terrorism. Rather, for dealing “with the fundamental problems revealed by the terrorist attacks.” Clarke’s three items are: “a massive effort to eliminate our vulnerabilities to terrorism at home,” “a concerted effort globally to counter the ideology of al Qaeda and the larger radical Islamic terrorist movement,” and to cooperate with other countries to “round up terrorists” and to “strengthen open governments and make it possible politically, economically, and socially for them to go after the roots of al Qaeda-like terrorism.” Which open governments? Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
One oddity that I need to mention here is that there is a point on which Richard A. Clarke and Doug Feith, the former Undersecretary for Policy in the Defense Department, agree. They both assert that the U.S. government has not developed an effective means to counter the ideological message of the Islamist movement. I might add that such a means, if we could develop and apply it, would make both turning America into a fortress, and rounding up terrorists overseas, unnecessary.
If you are interested in the origins of the September 11 attacks, and in the manner in which the U.S. government developed (or failed to develop) its counterterrorist policies, Against All Enemies is a good place to start.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Knight's Reading List VII: July 2007
Knight’s Reading List VII: July 2007
Now that I’ve posted a reading list – see “Knight’s Reading List VI: June 2007” posted October 6, 2008 – I keep thinking how long ago I read those books. I feel the need to bring things closer to the present, to my present concerns and what I’ve been reading lately. In part, I think this may be helpful to those who read my other contributions to this blog, by letting them know more about my sources and inspirations.
In July 2007 I finished seven books. One of them had been “in the works” for a couple of years. Several were books about Al-Qaeda and the war in Iraq that I read while traveling in the Pacific Northwest. One was a mediocre historical novel set in Byzantium. This was, perhaps, an odd mix.
1 July: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame. 1958. xxiii + 883 pages, including Index. I began reading this book in 2004 or early 2005, and started up again in July 2005. It took me an incredibly long time to read Montaigne, particularly as I enjoyed the essays greatly while reading them. The very richness of the essays was part of the problem I had; the classical allusions alone in some of the essays would give me material for reflection for days. Montaigne sends one scurrying off to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Plutarch’s Lives, just to find out the meaning of some intriguing passage. There is in these essays a model for the would-be essayist, as well as reflections upon many affairs of interest. The man was his work, and the work is the man, and many will find Montaigne a good companion.
4 July: H. N. Turtletaub, Justinian. 1998. 511 pages. I began reading on 12 May 2008. I had read a number of books by Harry Turtledove, who writes alternate universe science fiction. He is workmanlike, but he is, if anything, too prolific. He spreads himself and his subject matter a bit thin at times. This historical novel was readable. Compared to Gore Vidal, however, Turtletaub is crude and amateurish at his task.
7 July: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. 2006. 470 pages. I began reading it on 7 June 2008. This is a sinister book. It starts with Said Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who visited the United States back in the 1950s, and went back to Cairo determined to reject the materialist ways of the West. It picks up with the Egyptian Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it comes, eventually, to Osama bin Laden himself. Part biography, part the history of a political movement, The Looming Tower doesn’t really explain why bin Laden became the head of Al Qaeda, or how it works, but it provides a lot of interesting insights into the revolutionary as capitalist manqué. I found that my concept of how the U.S. and the West could deal with the challenge of Islam challenged by the complex implications of Wright’s description of this multi-faceted movement.
13 July: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco. 2006. xiv + 482 pages, including Notes, Acknowledgements and Index. I began this one on 2 July 2007. As you can tell, Fiasco was a pretty fast read. Ricks is a reporter for the Washington Post, and he got to meet a lot of people, both in Washington and in Iraq. This is almost as high-level as Bob Woodward’s book, and gives one the same sense that a lot of the people charged with setting Iraq policy either didn’t know what they were doing, are were so encumbered by ideological blinders that they couldn’t bring themselves to do what needed to be done. I have the feeling that instant history of this sort will be supplanted, one day, by more thoughtful histories, which may, however, lose a lot of the atmosphere.
15 July: Bob Woodward, State of Denial. 2006. xiv + 560 pages, including Sources and Index. I began reading this on 4 July 2007. This is the third of Woodward’s books on the post 911 military actions of the U.S. Government. I intentionally read the first two – Bush at War and Plan of Attack before tackling State of Denial. My main reason for that choice was that I read in many reviews, favorable and unfavorable, from the right and from the left, that Woodward in this book “turned on” George W. Bush. (I finished Bush at War in October 2006, and Plan of Attack in November, so it took me a while to execute my program.) I don’t think Woodward changed at all. A lot of comments in the earlier books sounded like compliments as long as everything was going well; once the war turned sour, the same kinds of comments seemed uncomplimentary. Woodward’s technique is much like Ricks’, or any good reporter: He talks to a lot of people, records what they say, and then collates all of these interviews into a picture. That picture becomes grimmer and grimmer in the course of State of Denial, but I don’t think that Woodward was cooking the books. Like a good camera, he was presenting what he saw, and what he saw no longer made the White House look good.
19 July: Deborah J. Bennett, Logic Made Easy. 2004. 256 pages, including Notes, References and Index. I began this book on 4 July 2007. I’ve read quite a few books on logic, some more academic than others. I’m not sure where Deborah J. Bennett goes wrong, but this is less engaging than the ultimate dry logic book, W. V. Quine’s Elementary Logic. I don’t recommend this one. Not at all. Nope.
24 July: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. 2006. 320 pages. I started reading this on 10 July 2007. This is most enjoyable of the several Iraq books I read during this period. The “emerald city” of the title is a play on the “Green Zone” in Baghdad, and the resemblance to Oz is not accidental. An American outpost in a Muslim country where pork chops, bacon, ham, and hot dogs were served in huge quantities by the Muslim kitchen staff, the Green Zone had very little connection to the real world, and most of the people there treated it entirely as a way station en route to their next assignment in the States. Chandrasekaran, who, like Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, lived outside the Green Zone, tries to focus on the contrast between what was happening in the real Iraq, and the perceptions inside the hothouse atmosphere of the Pentagon’s Middle Eastern branch.
Now that I’ve posted a reading list – see “Knight’s Reading List VI: June 2007” posted October 6, 2008 – I keep thinking how long ago I read those books. I feel the need to bring things closer to the present, to my present concerns and what I’ve been reading lately. In part, I think this may be helpful to those who read my other contributions to this blog, by letting them know more about my sources and inspirations.
In July 2007 I finished seven books. One of them had been “in the works” for a couple of years. Several were books about Al-Qaeda and the war in Iraq that I read while traveling in the Pacific Northwest. One was a mediocre historical novel set in Byzantium. This was, perhaps, an odd mix.
1 July: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame. 1958. xxiii + 883 pages, including Index. I began reading this book in 2004 or early 2005, and started up again in July 2005. It took me an incredibly long time to read Montaigne, particularly as I enjoyed the essays greatly while reading them. The very richness of the essays was part of the problem I had; the classical allusions alone in some of the essays would give me material for reflection for days. Montaigne sends one scurrying off to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Plutarch’s Lives, just to find out the meaning of some intriguing passage. There is in these essays a model for the would-be essayist, as well as reflections upon many affairs of interest. The man was his work, and the work is the man, and many will find Montaigne a good companion.
4 July: H. N. Turtletaub, Justinian. 1998. 511 pages. I began reading on 12 May 2008. I had read a number of books by Harry Turtledove, who writes alternate universe science fiction. He is workmanlike, but he is, if anything, too prolific. He spreads himself and his subject matter a bit thin at times. This historical novel was readable. Compared to Gore Vidal, however, Turtletaub is crude and amateurish at his task.
7 July: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. 2006. 470 pages. I began reading it on 7 June 2008. This is a sinister book. It starts with Said Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who visited the United States back in the 1950s, and went back to Cairo determined to reject the materialist ways of the West. It picks up with the Egyptian Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it comes, eventually, to Osama bin Laden himself. Part biography, part the history of a political movement, The Looming Tower doesn’t really explain why bin Laden became the head of Al Qaeda, or how it works, but it provides a lot of interesting insights into the revolutionary as capitalist manqué. I found that my concept of how the U.S. and the West could deal with the challenge of Islam challenged by the complex implications of Wright’s description of this multi-faceted movement.
13 July: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco. 2006. xiv + 482 pages, including Notes, Acknowledgements and Index. I began this one on 2 July 2007. As you can tell, Fiasco was a pretty fast read. Ricks is a reporter for the Washington Post, and he got to meet a lot of people, both in Washington and in Iraq. This is almost as high-level as Bob Woodward’s book, and gives one the same sense that a lot of the people charged with setting Iraq policy either didn’t know what they were doing, are were so encumbered by ideological blinders that they couldn’t bring themselves to do what needed to be done. I have the feeling that instant history of this sort will be supplanted, one day, by more thoughtful histories, which may, however, lose a lot of the atmosphere.
15 July: Bob Woodward, State of Denial. 2006. xiv + 560 pages, including Sources and Index. I began reading this on 4 July 2007. This is the third of Woodward’s books on the post 911 military actions of the U.S. Government. I intentionally read the first two – Bush at War and Plan of Attack before tackling State of Denial. My main reason for that choice was that I read in many reviews, favorable and unfavorable, from the right and from the left, that Woodward in this book “turned on” George W. Bush. (I finished Bush at War in October 2006, and Plan of Attack in November, so it took me a while to execute my program.) I don’t think Woodward changed at all. A lot of comments in the earlier books sounded like compliments as long as everything was going well; once the war turned sour, the same kinds of comments seemed uncomplimentary. Woodward’s technique is much like Ricks’, or any good reporter: He talks to a lot of people, records what they say, and then collates all of these interviews into a picture. That picture becomes grimmer and grimmer in the course of State of Denial, but I don’t think that Woodward was cooking the books. Like a good camera, he was presenting what he saw, and what he saw no longer made the White House look good.
19 July: Deborah J. Bennett, Logic Made Easy. 2004. 256 pages, including Notes, References and Index. I began this book on 4 July 2007. I’ve read quite a few books on logic, some more academic than others. I’m not sure where Deborah J. Bennett goes wrong, but this is less engaging than the ultimate dry logic book, W. V. Quine’s Elementary Logic. I don’t recommend this one. Not at all. Nope.
24 July: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. 2006. 320 pages. I started reading this on 10 July 2007. This is most enjoyable of the several Iraq books I read during this period. The “emerald city” of the title is a play on the “Green Zone” in Baghdad, and the resemblance to Oz is not accidental. An American outpost in a Muslim country where pork chops, bacon, ham, and hot dogs were served in huge quantities by the Muslim kitchen staff, the Green Zone had very little connection to the real world, and most of the people there treated it entirely as a way station en route to their next assignment in the States. Chandrasekaran, who, like Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, lived outside the Green Zone, tries to focus on the contrast between what was happening in the real Iraq, and the perceptions inside the hothouse atmosphere of the Pentagon’s Middle Eastern branch.
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