Against some enemies: Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies doesn't live up to its title. President Bush and his administration are sharply criticized, but other guilty parties are strangely ignored.

Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, by Richard A. Clarke, New York: Free Press (a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.), 304 pages, hardcover.

Richard Clarke wasn't "out of the loop," as claimed offhandedly by Vice President Dick Cheney on March 22. Cheney's attempt to cast doubt on Clarke's criticisms came the day after the nation's former counterterrorism "czar" received national attention in the wake of the first of his many televised interviews.

Not only was Clarke in the loop, he was its commander. In his Against All Enemies, Clarke points out that within hours of the 9-11 attack, he convened a video-conference meeting of the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG). Participants included all of America's top security personnel, among whom were Cabinet officials and high-ranking members of the presidential staff. When Clarke asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice if she preferred conducting this hastily assembled response to that morning's devastating attack, she replied, "No, you run it," and then stepped aside. After all, Clarke had chaired the CSG since 1992 and had won appointment during the Clinton administration as the nation's first national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counterterrorism. He gained reappointment to that post by President Bush, and he was as well-versed on terrorism as anyone in government.

According to Clarke's account of that initial post-9-11 meeting, he handed out orders left and right--to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet and dozens of others. Worried about the possibility of further attacks on Washington, he even directed President Bush's aides not to bring the president back immediately from his Florida speaking engagement. He then related what occurred when the president informed the CSG via video conferencing from a Nebraska Air Force base later that very day: "I'm coming back to the White House as soon as this plane is fueled. No discussion. Item two, briefing by Dick Clarke." Was Clarke out of the loop? Hardly!

Clarke's Charges

Other than Cheney's flippant remark, no CSG member or administration official has even tried to counter the claims in Clarke's book about his key role in the government's counterterrorism effort. What has stung many, however, are his charges that the president, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and others were more consumed in the after math of 9-11 with attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq than they had ever been about his constant warnings about al-Qaeda.

Having repeatedly urged action against Osama bin Laden's network during the Clinton administration, Clarke wrote that he finally gained the attention of the Bush team only a week before 9-11: "It had taken since January [2001] to get the cabinet-level meeting that I had requested 'urgently' within days of the inauguration to approve an aggressive plan to go after al Qaeda." Yet, within 24 hours of the attack and with Clarke's warnings fresh in their minds, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice and the president himself sought to downplay al-Qaeda's responsibility and shift the blame to Iraq.

Clarke's book also aims criticism at the FBI and CIA. The very day the planes struck their targets, he learned that the FBI had the names of al-Qaeda operatives who were on board the hijacked planes. Having tried for several years to get various government agencies focused on threats from al-Qaeda, he wrote: "I was stunned, not that the attack was al Qaeda but that there were al Qaeda operatives aboard using names that the FBI knew were al Qaeda." Asking an aide how that could be, he was told that the "CIA forgot to tell us about them."

Much of this book focuses on Clarke's steadily growing awareness during the 1990s of the threat posed by bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. He saw their handiwork in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2000 suicide mission directed at the USS Cole in Yemen, and more. But, as he insists throughout the book, few gave his warnings serious attention. Sharply critical of President Bush and many administration officials, he noted that an early attempt to impress Condoleezza Rice about the looming danger from al-Qaeda resulted in her giving him "the impression that she had never heard the term before."

In his final chapter entitled "Right War, Wrong War," Clarke claims that the post-9-11 campaign aimed at al-Qaeda was proper though very late. But targeting Saddam Hussein, he insists, was not only the wrong war, it "gave al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable." Maybe that was the point of the whole exercise. As for the Bush administration's repeated claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had sponsored al-Qaeda, he concluded: "I suspect that many of the heroic U.S. troops who risked their lives fighting in Iraq thought, because of misleading statements from the White House, that they were avenging the 3,000 dead from September 11."

Bush Team Reaction

As might be expected, the Bush team reacted to Clarke's book with claims that he was merely seeking financial gain, or that his claims weren't credible, or that he was attempting to hurt the president's re-election effort. Those heavy-handed denunciations bring to mind several other examples of retaliation against anyone who dared question the Bush agenda and the totally discredited reasons for attacking Iraq.

When Army Chief of Staff General Erik Shinseki publicly announced his belief that several hundred thousand troops, many more than the number claimed by the Bush administration, would be needed to occupy Iraq, he was ridiculed and forced to step down. Recently dismissed Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill stated in his book that the planning for an invasion of Iraq was well underway before 9-11 and found himself denounced as a scatterbrain who didn't know what he was talking about.

Former State Department envoy Joseph C. Wilson authored a New York Times op-ed column to dispute assertions in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear bomb and had even attempted to purchase uranium from the African nation of Niger. Payback for him included a leak disclosing his wife's role as a CIA agent, thereby possibly placing her life in jeopardy. But the claims made by Shinseki, O'Neill and Wilson were correct. And the many criticisms of the Bush administration contained in Clarke's Against All Enemies seem also to be on target.

Establishment Career

How Clarke rose from a humble background to be at the center of our nation's counterterrorism effort deserves some attention. A look into his early years shows Clarke to have harbored ambitious eerily similar to those present in the young Bill Clinton. Growing up ha Boston in the '50s and '60s as the only child of a widowed mother, he expressed a strong desire to carve out a career in government. Admitted to the prestigious Boston Latin school as a seventh grader, he is remembered even today by classmates and teachers as a highly competent student, debater and writer who could be seen reading Foreign Affairs and the Congressional Record during public transportation trips to and from school. One former schoolmate recently told the Boston Globe that Clarke was "obsessed with politics, fascinated with foreign affairs, and deeply interested in history [though] more interested in policy specifics than in ideology."

Clarke earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Pennsylvania and began his career in government in 1973 as a nuclear weapons analyst. He took time away from public service five years later to earn a master's degree at MIT. In the late 1970s he worked as a State Department analyst under Leslie Gelb, a future president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He then found work as an assistant secretary of state for intelligence in the Reagan administration and as a member of the National Security Council for the past three presidents. Appointed the nation's counterintelligence "czar" during the Clinton administration, he held that post until he resigned in March 2003 and set out to write his book.

Overlooked or Misrepresented

Clarke's comments about several important events, however, are deficient for a man who functioned among the elite of our nation's intelligence effort. For instance, while discussing the first war against Iraq (1991), he completely ignored President George H.W. Bush's repeated insistence that its purpose was to create a "new world order" and a "reinvigorated United Nations." He never mentioned the salient fact that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, acted on instructions from Washington when she told Saddam Hussein that his plan to invade Kuwait would spark no retaliation from the United States. Clarke states, instead, that the purpose of Desert Stoma was to protect U.S. access to Sandi oil supplies, something even the president never told the nation.

His account of the Clinton administration is, at times, puzzling or misleading. For instance, he has nothing but praise for Clinton's first national security adviser, Anthony Lake. A veteran of the CFR, Lake was connected to the Institute for Policy Studies, a leftist Washington think-tank that worked closely with the Soviet KGB. Lake's subversive connections--exposed by this magazine and its affiliated organization, the John Birch Society--were sufficient to scuttle his 1997 nomination to be head of the CIA.

Clarke also makes the incredible claim that the Clinton administration's intervention in the Balkans arrested the spread of radical Islam in the region. Exactly the opposite is the truth: NATO's bombing of the Bosnian Serbs in 1995, and its 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, helped install allies of Osama bin Laden in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Clarke proudly relates that he derived the title of his book, Against All Enemies, from the oath a federal official swears "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies...." However, his proclaimed reverence for the Constitution failed to stimulate any outrage when both wars against Iraq, the latest of which he aptly criticizes as "unnecessary," resulted from a White House decree and from UN authorization, not from a formal declaration of war required by the Constitution.

Also, while intensely critical of the Bush administration's obsessive focus on Iraq in the wake of 9-11, he provides no information about the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz decades-long campaign to have the U.S. attack Iraq a second time. An intelligence expert should have known that, during the Clinton years when these men no longer held the offices they had possessed during the first Bush administration, they formed the Project for the New American Century, the main goal of which was to send U.S. forces back into Iraq. It was they who persuaded the second President Bush and others in his administration to blame Saddam for the 9-11 attack.

Furthermore, Clarke accepts the National Transportation Safety Board's highly questionable conclusion that the 1996 destruction of TWA 800 resulted from an explosion in an empty fuel tank. Several hundred eyewitnesses to the incident claimed seeing what looked like a missile ascending toward the doomed plane. And non-government crash investigators who disputed the NTSB's findings were ignored. Terrorism experts such as Clarke, already convinced that "al Qaeda was here," should have looked more deeply into the cause of this tragedy.

Although he's quick to dismiss "conspiracy theories" about TWA 800, Clarke grudgingly admits that he could "never disprove" the Middle East connection to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing--a subject extensively explored by this magazine in ground-breaking exposes by senior editor William F. Jasper. Curiously, while Clarke loudly declaims against the Bush administration's lies and coverups, he displays no similar zeal for the truth about the Clinton administration's OKC deceptions. Nor is there any mention of the Council on Foreign Relations membership of so many of the individuals he was dealing with during his years in government.

While the Clarke book provides needed criticism of flawed and deficient handling of important national affairs, it will likely leave readers with the sense that most of our leaders are incompetent dullards. Yet, he emphatically concludes that the latest war against Iraq was totally unjustified. And, with no difficulty whatsoever, we find ourselves in solid agreement with his summation given in this book's final pages: "Indeed, because the U.S. apparently believes in imposing its ideology through the violence of war, many in the Arab world wonder how the United States can criticize the [Islamic] fundamentalists who seek to impose their ideology through violence."

Against All Enemies is worth reading, even if it doesn't answer all the questions about America's vulnerability and ostensibly self-defeating (more like treasonous) conduct.