Few political memoirs have
made such a dramatic entrance as that by Richard A. Clarke. During the
week of the initial publication of Against All Enemies, Clarke was
featured
on 60 Minutes, testified before the 9/11 commission, and touched off a
raging controversy over how the presidential administration handled the
threat of terrorism and the post-9/11 geopolitical landscape. Clarke, a
veteran Washington insider who had advised presidents Reagan, George
H.W.
Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush, dissects each man's approach to
terrorism
but levels the harshest criticism at the latter Bush and his advisors
who,
Clarke asserts, failed to take terrorism and Al-Qaeda seriously.
Clarke details how, in light of
mounting intelligence of the danger Al-Qaeda presented, his urgent
requests
to move terrorism up the list of priorities in the early days of the
administration
were met with apathy and procrastination and how, after the attacks
took
place, Bush and key figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,
and
Dick Cheney turned their attention almost immediately to Iraq, a nation
not involved in the attacks. Against All Enemies takes the reader
inside
the Beltway beginning with the Reagan administration, who failed to
retaliate
against the 1982 Beirut bombings, fueling the perception around the
world
that the United States was vulnerable to such attacks. Terrorism
becomes
a growing but largely ignored threat under the first President Bush,
whom
Clarke cites for his failure to eliminate Saddam Hussein, thereby
necessitating
a continued American presence in Saudi Arabia that further inflamed
anti-American
sentiment. Clinton, according to Clarke, understood the gravity of the
situation and became increasingly obsessed with stopping Al-Qaeda. He
had
developed workable plans but was hamstrung by political infighting and
the sex scandal that led to his impeachment. But Bush and his advisers,
Clarke says, didn't get it before 9/11 and they didn't get it after,
taking
a unilateral approach that seemed destined to lead to more attacks on
Americans
and American interests around the world. Clarke's inside accounts of
what
happens in the corridors of power are fascinating and the book, written
in a compelling, highly readable style, at times almost seems like a
fiction
thriller. But the threat of terrorism and the consequences of Bush's
approach
to it feel very sobering and very real.
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