Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror – Richard Clarke

Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror – Richard Clarke, Free Press/Simon & Schuster, Inc. (2004) 304pp. (S) ****

Though his prose often lacks eloquence, Richard Clarke’s voice is one of truth, reason, experience, and wisdom, and in writing this book, he has done his countrymen and the world a great service. In the epilogue, Clarke notes how many of his colleagues, in addition to himself, have left the Bush administration in frustration. These men and women are tremendous national treasures and assets, that have been squandered by a religious zealot. Indeed, this in itself, is a great tragedy. In observing the differences between Bush Jr. and Clinton, Clarke writes that the former is an incurious, linear thinker, who prefers wrongheaded action and resolution, while the latter is a man of measured reason, higher learning, and who possesses a much greater grasp of the complexities of life. Maybe this is why “there have been far more terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda and its regional clones in the thirty months since September 11 than there were in the thirty months prior . . . ”(p. 287)

Another excerpt worthy of full quotation is as follows: “The Attorney General [John Ashcroft], rather than bringing us together, managed to persuade much of the country that the needed reforms of the Patriot Act were actually the beginning of fascism.”(p. 286)(the emphasis is mine) Finally, someone has put the forbidden word into print – the 800 lb. gorilla that no one until now has had the courage, integrity, and commonsense to point out. Though he only mentions it in passing, what better word is there to describe the present political climate, where all checks and balances have been removed via one party governance of the extreme right wing, where a militant nationalism is promulgated along with the intimate wedding of state and corporate interests. Sprinkle in a heavy shaking of religious rhetoric and you begin to have something that smells awfully like something akin to theocratic fascism.

With respect to Iraq, Clarke writes, “nothing America could have done would have provided Al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our [U.S.] unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country [Iraq].”(p. 246) He goes on later to say, “Even if Iraq still had WMD stockpiles, possession of weapons of mass destruction is not in and of itself a threat to the United States.”(p. 267) Though now this may sound like a fairly obvious statement, at the time of publication in early 2004, the U.S. was still rummaging Iraq for it infamous, and what we now have come to discover as non-existent, WMD. Furthermore, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Clarke observed this paradox, “ironically, Clinton was blamed for a ‘wag the dog’ strategy in 1998 dealing with the real threat from Al Qaeda but no one labeled Bush’s 2003 war on Iraq as a ‘wag the dog’ move even though the ‘crisis’ was manufactured and Bush political advisor Karl Rove was telling Republicans to run on the war.”(p. 186) How true. Anything Clinton got away with, the Bush administration has trumped it a hundred fold, hiding everything they do under a patriotic guise. Some might even call it the ultimate act of political chutzpah to turn the greatest breakdown in American national security history, the 9/11/01 attacks, into a political asset. Either that, or it speaks very little of an emasculated public either too diffident or fearful to call out their bluff.

Perhaps Clarke’s greatest flaw is that at times he doesn’t seem able to see beyond Bin Laden. For instance, he tells us, “I still to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third party nationals, or some combination who would locate Bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him.”(p. 204) Maybe the answer lies in the possibility that the CIA and FBI realized the importance of keeping Bin Laden on the shelf to be pulled out on a later date, when the U.S., in pursuit of diminishing oil reserves, really needed an enemy du jour. Such a possibility casts the 9/11 attacks themselves in stark relief. Nowhere does Clarke mention the insider “put” trading that took place around 9/11, nor does he address the notion of how one, ill man could direct and coordinate such a sophisticated attack as we witnessed on 9/11/01. Likely this is asking too much of a former government insider. That said, we can still take quite a bit away from this work that offers a glimpse into the corrupt foreign policy machinations of the Bush Jr. administration.