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.

Reviewing Books by Unpleasant People

If you look at the sidebar on the right-hand side of this blog, you'll see Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies. This is one of the earliest "insider" books about the September 11 attacks, and Clarke looks at both the events leading up to 9/11 and the Bush administration's reaction to that supreme act of terrorism. A number of the other books on the subject are reacting to Clarke in one way or another. Michael Scheuer spends quite a bit of time in Marching Toward Hell, which was reviewed on this blog some time ago, criticizing Clarke.

My own review of Against All Enemies is half-written. I find Clarke easy to criticize. He's pompous; he is critical of others but never finds fault with his own actions or omissions; he has the defensive attitude one finds in people who feels they've been left out of the inner circle. In fact, a lot of Clarke's criticism of the Bush administration as a whole, and Condoleeza Rice in particular, comes down to "They didn't listen to me!" In short, Clarke is a rather unpleasant person. It would be easy to dismiss him as a self-justifying ass.

But that isn't the whole truth. Clarke was an insider, and he was involved in counterterrorism and related activities for many years. He worked at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. He was in on a lot of investigations and discussions. He was "read in" on the subject to an extraordinary degree. So there is a lot of valuable material in Against All Enemies. You just have to get past the blowhard, know-it-all narrator to find it.

All of which is by way of saying that I have found this a very difficult book to review. I found myself spending a lot of time criticizing Clarke's personal qualities, rather than attending to the substance of the book. Now that I've gotten this off my chest, I hope the review itself will be easier to finish.

Have a good day!

Obama's National Security Team

Fred Kaplan wrote a column for Slate about the appointment of Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (The column is attached to the title of this piece.) The burden of Mr. Kaplan's assertion that this is a good appointment is that Panetta knows his audience. More to the point, he knows what the consumers of intelligence need to know.

I used to do training for a living. My then-manager taught me one very valuable lesson about training, one which applies to other areas of life. The point isn't to tell your audience everything you know, although that might make you look smart. The point is to tell them what they need to know in order to do their jobs. That means that you need to know their business; you need to know something about their jobs and what is required to do them. So I can see Mr. Kaplan's point: Panetta knows what information his customers need, so he will also know what information to demand from the resources under his command.

The weakness of appointing a career professional to the top job isn't only that he won't have any political clout, although he won't, at least until he proves himself. It's that agencies have values that distort the information they give the consumers - values that are irrelevant to the needs of the consumers. For example, I hear that there is a tendency to rotate the subjects of the President's Daily Brief among various bureaus, so that no one will feel left out. That's all very well, but the only criteria for inclusion in the brief is how important the information may be to decisions the President is going to have to make.

For this sort of objective assessment you need people who understand the political process and what issues are confronting the White House. On the other hand, you also need a lot of solid professionals to support the effort. It appears from another Kaplan article that Mr. Obama is putting together a very sound team of professionals at the operational level in the Defense and State Departments: http://www.slate.com/id/2208215/

Lest you think that only the mainstream media types at Slate see benefits in the appointment of Mr. Panetta, Mark Safranski wrote an article on the subject which appeared in the conservative site Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-leon-panetta-may-be-the-right-man-for-cia-chief/.

These may be straws in the wind, but it seems that Mr. Obama is determined to have good advisors, and good implementers, on the national security front, so that he can concentrate on the economy without worrying that the world will descend into chaos due to American inattention.