The President's nemesis

Published : Apr 23, 2004 00:00 IST

Richard A. Clarke. - AP

Richard A. Clarke. - AP

Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke; Free Press, 2004; pages 305, $27.

ON January 20, 2001, George W. Bush swore the oath of office as the 43rd President of the United States. He vowed, as per tradition, to support and defend the Constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic". He has certainly acquired millions of both. Among the most dangerous in the many categories of foe are people who worked for him who now want to tell their story.

Richard A. Clarke provides the latest offering. His account is perhaps the most devastating yet. Its power lies in its lack of polemic and its abundance of perspective. This is a man who served four Presidents over more than a decade, most recently as head of counter-terrorism at the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and Bush the younger.

The publicity surrounding the book - his allegation that Bush and the neo-Conservatives ignored the Al Qaeda threat as they pursued their obsessions with Iraq - has, in the middle of an election year, wounded the White House deeply. But Clarke's is a broader narrative. His tour d' horizon of the world of terrorism and intelligence takes us from the Soviet Union to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia to the Tokyo underground nerve-gas attacks, to the Oklahoma bombing and, inevitably, to the two Gulf wars. He takes us through the various attacks on U.S. targets well before 9/11.

He describes the gradual emergence of a man "whose name kept appearing buried in the CIA's raw reporting as terrorist financier Osama bin Laden". It took several years for the intelligence community in Washington to appreciate the danger bin Laden posed. Intriguingly, Clarke recounts the various attempts in the late 1990s by U.S. special forces to kill him.

His recollection of the Clinton administration's approach to terrorism might be unduly generous. Time and again, he gives Clinton the benefit of the doubt, such as the bombing of the Sudan chemical factory in 1998 to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal.

And yet the juxtaposition with Bush is vivid and shocking. The incoming team used an acronym ABC (Anything But Clinton). Whatever the outgoing lot did, do the opposite. This extended even to national security. "In January 2001, the new administration really thought Clinton's recommendation that eliminating Al Qaeda be one of their highest priorities, well, rather odd."

This is not the first account of events inside the White House on 9/11 and in the desperate days that followed. It was Bob Woodward, in Bush at War, who first described how the neo-cons tried to link the attack on the Twin Towers with Iraq and goaded Bush to use it as a pretext for war against Saddam Hussein. However, Woodward's obsequious style minimised the impact.

Clarke tells it straight. He describes how Bush ordered him to "see if Saddam did this. See if he is linked in any way. I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr President, Al Qaeda did this'".

Bush ordered him testily to look again for `any shred'. Even though the Americans did go first for Afghanistan, the deliberate conflation of two separate issues begat Bush's infamous "axis of evil speech" in January 2002, which begat the secret deal with Blair at the presidential ranch in Crawford that April to prepare for war with Iraq.

This is an insightful and fluent tale, but it is hampered by a continuous "I was right all along" subtext. When Clarke quit a year ago, many players in the poisonous inter-agency world were pleased to see him go.

Bush and Blair have long given up hope of salvaging any political advantage from Iraq. The latest inquiries in Washington and London over weapons of mass destruction and the flawed intelligence of the last several years will cause them further damage. The jigsaw is painstakingly being put together. Whatever his motivation, whatever his timing, Clarke has provided some invaluable new pieces.

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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