Richard Clarke has created a lot of ripples recently following the publication of his book "Against All Enemies." The press has treated the book as an assault of President Bush, but after reading it, I can't agree. Clarke absolutely criticizes the President, but the book's purpose, function, goal is not anti-Bush. He doesn't come off as upset at Bush per se as much as he is upset at the failures in government. Bush isn't the only one who takes the heat either. The FBI comes out looking about as inefficient and worthless as as a cheese grater with no holes in it. Paul Wolfovitz isn't discussed at length, but the little bits that bear mentioning by Clarke are damning enough. Wolfovitz pulled an intelligence chief out of Indonesia for raising a ruckus and beating the bushes looking for Al Qaeda, 6 months before the Bali blast by the specific people the agent was trying to get people to help him look for. Wolfie owes the victims and their families a direct and personal apology.
Clarke didn't strike as me as personally bitter about his demotion as much as he was pissed off that the position itself wasn't given more respect. I don't think he'd have written the book if he had been fired and told to wear a dead chicken up his butt if the new administration would have paid attention to and made more efforts to thwart the terrorism threat in the United States. It wasn't personal as much as professional bitterness that led to the book.
The story presented is fascinating on many accounts because it illustrates how the top levels of our government and civic institutions work. The book begins with the response teams at the White House and then goes back to Clarke's service under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush.
Clarke's analysis of the Bush team and the war in Iraq have generated the most media interest but the FBI and CIA get hit harder and more consistently and should bear more of the criticism and responsibility. Bush/Cheney/Rice could have done better by focusing on the potential for domestic attacks with the intensity they've devoted to Iraq (and discrediting Clarke, for that matter), but even if they had, there is no faith on my part, based on what Clarke wrote, that the FBI and CIA would have come through for him. On the other hand, had the FBI and CIA done their jobs better, they would have been able to convince the government that more needed to be done.
The FBI was just wholly pathetic. The only way to communicate was on the phone or face to face. They were not even using technology that the terrorists used to plan the attacks. Inexcusable, and blame lies on every President and FBI head for the last 20 years.
The CIA dragged its feet all over the place, especially during the Clinton years, when it came time to make moves against the terrorists. As Clarke points out, the CIA has been burned time and again when they conduct secret operations that go awry. CIA ends up holding the bag, whether they deserve it or not.
The military wasn't very helpful either. As Clarke describes it, the debacle in Somalia was due to tactical errors by the officers in Africa but Clinton took the heat for it. This is in spite of Clinton's resolve not to run from the country but stay in until power could be transferred to the UN 6 months later. The terrorists (and Somalia was an Al Qaeda and terrorist incident, according to Clarke (as was the Bosnia flareup)) took it as that though, and were emboldened by it, just as when the mujahidin in Afghanistan defeated the Soviets and the Soviets didn't just retrench but up and ran home.
When Clinton came the military for suggestions on taking care of Al Qaeda, they consistently came up with full-on assaults and invasions, options that were so overwhelmingly complex they didn't have a chance at being implemented. Even if Clinton had an interest in following such plans, their size and complexity guaranteed casualties and would have required lengthy negotiations with allies to get permission. But Clinton wanted immediate action to arrest bin Laden or destroy Al Qaeda camps. Besides, Clinton didn't trust the military much after they fucked up Somalia.
Then (this is a big one to me) was the whole impeachment process. Not only did the childishness, pettiness, and lack of integrity by the president and the Congress weaken our nation by harshly dividing it on partisan lines (that have been further amplified and divisive since then), but they destroyed Clinton's political capital when he needed it to attack Al Qaeda. The attacks on Afghanistan following the embassy bombings in Africa were widely criticized as wag-the-dog distractions by the President to bolster his domestic position and divert attention from his personal indiscretions and legal mistakes.
According to Clarke, though, the motivation for the attacks were entirely distinct from the domestic turmoil Clinton was dealing with. The only connection between that military action and Monica was that the President wasn't able to implement the full desired assault because of the criticism arising from the impeachment issue. Had Clinton told the truth under oath or had Congress not needlessly impeached him, there would have been a greater chance that we would have killed bin Laden and disrupted Al Qaeda. As Clarke explains it, Clinton was much more willing to use American military force or covert operations to arrest bin Laden than we are aware of. The military and CIA were unwilling and unable to put into action the plans authorized by the President. For example, Clinton signed every single request for covert kidnapping and arrest of terrorists in office, but many of them were not carried out operationally.
I recount all of this not out of defense of Clinton but as illustrations of how our institutions failed us even when our government tried to help us. I do not see how Bush could have done any better pre-9/11 (but that doesn't excuse him for not trying).
Another HUGE revelation comes from the interrogation of the Saudi Arabian terrorist Zabaydi. The U.S. tried to play good cop/ bad cop by sending in a good cop team of U.S. agents to reap the benefits of the fear that was supposed to be inflicted by the bad cop team of "Saudi" agents, who were actually U.S. agents appearing as Saudis and hoping to use the threats of Saudi punishments as leverage. Surprisingly, Zabaydi was exalted to be granted private consultation with Saudis and told them to call a particular number and talk to a particular person who would help get him out of the mess. Turns out that this particular person was Crown Prince Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, who Zabaydi claimed had general knowledge of the impending attacks in advance. He also had a few other major Saudi Arabian leaders' phone numbers memorized, indicating a familiarity and closeness with the ruling family. Once he realized that he was talking to U.S. investigators, however, Zabaydi clammed up and recanted his earlier statements.
The final 3 chapters of book address the post-9/11 response of the Bush team and lays out Clarke's opinion on what should have been done instead. Bush doesn't get as much attention in the book as I expected based on the media treatment. We see the Bush teams in action on 9/11 in the first chapter and then don't really touch on them until the end of the book. Clarke points out how the notion of Iraq as a terrorist state is utterly false and discredits any attempt to portray Iraq as a terrorism threat. While always reserving the possibility that he may be wrong, his assessment is worth paying attention to because of his expertise in this specific department, on these specific issues.
In spite of the accuracy of claims regarding Saddam Hussein's barbarism and the unquestionable desirability of his removal, going into Iraq was a major mistake in the pursuit of security for the United States and the world. The invasion diverted attention from the hunt for Bin Laden and our efforts to reform Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. If that wasn't bad enough, we spurned our allies and squandered the opportunities provided by the cohesiveness and goodwill, both domestically and internationally, 9/11 brought about.
And if losing sight of our goals and destroying our own support structure wasn't bad enough, the invasion of an oil-rich Arab nation that did not pose a threat to us has done more to aid bin Laden's cause than anything he has ever done himself. We validated his predictions and the latent beliefs of many that the United States is a wanton aggressor. We've handed radicals actual fodder for recruitment at the same time that we created a power vacuum in the exact center of the region that incubates hostile individuals, granting them a physical location that serves the dual purpose of providing training grounds and attack targets in one easy-to-access geographic location.
Yes, we have made life better for some Iraqis, but we have drastically reduced the short- and long-term security of our nation and way of life in the process while squandering military lives and billions (that is thousands of millions) of dollars.
We cannot forget that all of the issues pertaining to the prevention of 9/11 covered by Clarke all took place prior to 9/11. We've become accustomed to a world defined by the attacks and it can be easy to forget how secure we felt, how complacent we were. There were other things going on in the world that commanded the attention of intelligence services and policy makers. There are infinite possible ways that we could have been attacked and the evidence was not handled correctly by the intelligence sector. Had the information that Al Qaeda operatives were in the U.S. been collated with the knowledge of non-citizens from the Middle East taking flying lessons and our established awareness of the appeal airplanes had to terrorists, and aided by but not dependent on Presidential leadership that provided an impetus to connect the dots, I believe that the attacks could have been prevented. We've stopped other big attacks (the tunnels on the east coast, the millennium bombing attempts, security at Olympics, etc) and could have stopped this one. That isn't to say that the terrorists would never had slipped one past the goalie eventually. Even though they have to only succeed once and we have to succeed every time, there is no reason why we can't. Every major attack is preventable and failure to do so is exactly that, failure.
The paths charted following 9/11, however, are not defendable by relying on our complacency, innocence, naivete, and lack of imagination. This is why the smaller portion of Clarke's book is getting so much attention. We can have greater expectations following 9/11 because the veil has dropped and we can see what we are up against. Making options that reduce the power of terrorists and the desirability of being a terrorists the highest priority and reducing the priority (regardless of the desirability) of options that are good and worthy options but that just don't address the threats of terrorism is what we expected, but it is not what we got.
This fall, the American public has to decide on wether to reelect an administration that has taken a mistaken course of action following 9/11 and which shows no indication of changing its attitude or direction or elect a new administration with essentially unknown and untested policies. Situations like these favor the incumbent because no one is comfortable switching horses in mid-stream on issues with such importance, but we can not excuse the failures and mistakes of Bush et. al. nor ignore the likelihood that they will continue such trajectories in the next term. I'm not saying "Anybody but Bush" here, as we have to expect the alternative candidates to provide plausible policies. But we have to weigh the proposed policies of the challengers against Bush's whole record, not just his conviction and zeal. With that in mind, I find it very difficult to imagine a candidate who focuses on catching bin Laden and fixing the problems in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia as doing more harm than Bush will up to 2008.
Clarke's message is that he tried hard over 2 decades to pay attention to the threats against the country and do what he could to protect us. He is against the blatant enemies of the state, but he was also frustrated throughout by different administrations' policies, turf battles in Washington, D.C., and others' failures to comprehend what he believed to be obvious, that we were in danger. His book reads quick and easy, and I recommend it to everyone and anyone interested in knowing more about how our government works in general as well as details pertaining to the whole 9/11 debacle.
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Posted by Nutrimentia at April 15, 2004 06:16 PM | TrackBack