Arts & Books Section.
AGAINST ALL ENEMIES: INSIDE AMERICA’S WAR ON TERROR.
by Richard A. Clarke,
Simon & Schuster,
320 pages, $37.350
Special to The Gazette “We got some passenger manifests from the airlines,” FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson informed his White House counterpart Richard A. Clarke on September 11, 2001. “We recognize some names, Dick. They’re Al-Qa’ida.”
In ‘Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,’ Clarke’s compelling memoir about fighting terrorism for a decade before 9/11 and in the months thereafter, he writes: “I was stunned, not that the attack was Al-Qa’ida but that there were AI-Qa’ida operatives on board aircraft using names that FBI knew were Al-Qa’ida.”
Clarke asked how they got on board. “CIA forgot to tell us about them,” Watson explained.
Considering the destructive scale of the Sept. 11 attacks, it is natural to seek scapegoats, and especially presidential scapegoats. Clarke’s book has become an instant best-seller because at the 9/11 commission hearings, and on seemingly every media outlet last month, he accused George W Bush’s administration of negligence before 9/11 and incompetence subsequently.
Clarke’s’ pro-Clinton, anti–Bush accusations frame the book -in the opening and closing chapters. In the more judicious, and fortunately longer middle, Clarke points the finger where it really belongs: at a sclerotic, turf-oriented bureaucratic culture, especially among the CIA and FBI; at a political system that works in four-year waves and is often too partisan; and at a somnolent public, which clung to the post-Cold War myth of perennial peace and prosperity.
At the presidential level, too, there is enough blame to go around. Although you would not know it from reading the head-lines or hearing partisan finger-pointers, a bipartisan march of folly paved the path to destruction.
Clarke begins with ‘Ronald Reagan’s administration, because that is when he became an insider. The story should begin with Jimmy Carter’s failure to respond effectively when the Iranians kidnapped American diplomats in 1979.
Encouraging terrorism by telegraphing weakness, Carter’s failure was compounded by Reagan’s retreat from Lebanon after suicidal truck bombers murdered nearly 300 marines, by George H..W. Bush’s premature end to the first Gulf War to placate the Saudis, by Clinton’s inability to snatch Osama bin Laden or destroy the Al-Qa’ida terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, and by George W. Bush’s sluggishness in focusing his young administration on this shadowy threat.
“Could we have stopped the Sept. 11 attack?” Clarke asks. “It would be facile to say yes. What is clear is that there were failures in the organizations that we trusted to protect us, failures to get information to the right place at the right time, earlier failures to act boldly to reduce or eliminate the threat.”
All these are crimes of omission. The true criminals remain the Islamicist terrorists themselves, with their nihilistic ideology of death, and their supporting cast.of millions -including the Saudis who bankrolled them, the Pakistanis who protected them, the Sudanese and Afghanis who hosted them, and the Iranians, Syrians, Iraqis and Egyptians who encouraged them -and still do.
Clarke is most effective in detailing the attempts he and other bureaucrats made to disrupt Al-Qa’ida and press its various supporters to stop feeding the beast. He has the memoirist’s disease of always being right and, in this case, prescient, too. It is clear, however, that he retired frustrated by the Bush approach. To highlight those differences, Clarke tends to discount Saddam Hussein’s role in this broader problem of rogue states sustaining venal Jihadists.
Nevertheless, Clarke’s sobering, clear-eyed account demonstrates the complex challenge involved in fighting this terrorist scourge. Clarke advocates more systematic defenses, a more proactive and co-operative U.S. foreign policy, and better outreach to the Islamic world.to change the often warm welcome feeding its ugly ideology.
Describing the international success in thwarting Al-Qa’ida’s planned orgy of death for the millennium, Clarke discusses the “sleeper cell of Algerian Mujahedeen in Montreal” central to that plot. “How the Canadians had missed the cell was difficult to understand,” he adds. In fact, Clarke explains how pre-9/11, it was easy for Canadians, Americans and others to miss the boat, to ignore the apparent, to trust that terrorism might happen elsewhere but not at home. This fascinating, passionate memoir demonstrates, however, that, having seen the evil of Al-Qa’ida’s network of pathological Islamicists, such sloppiness today is not only inexplicable, but inexcusable.
Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University.
