 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Against All Enemies
By Richard A. Clarke
Free Press $39.95
 Dick Clarke is the security chief who worked with four US Presidents (Reagan, Clinton and both Bushs) and ran the Situation Room after the 9/11 attacks. He is an expert in analysing global terror, and his book has taken America by storm in the past month, prompting a massive counterattack by Bush and his Republican guard - to borrow a Saddam term - who seek to discredit the author and minimise his ability to sabotage the President's re-election campaign.
The memoir, written in the first person by one who has a detailed recall of events, is a hand grenade into the Bush camp - although Reagan, daddy Bush and Clinton don't escape either - and immensely persuasive.
Although unfolded in detail, the argument is relatively simple: the US made "four mistakes during Reagan's time that affect us today" and they can be summarised as follows: the CIA became dependent upon Pakistani intelligence to aid the Afghans (who were fighting Russia), meaning the USA developed fewer loyalties than it should have for "our multibillion-dollar effort";
America "sought or acquiesced in the importation into Pakistan and Afghanistan of an army of Arabs", many of whom became the Al Qaeda network of terrorist groups; The quick US pullout abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban fanatics; And the US did little to help Pakistan deal with the impact of Afghan refuges and 'wealthy, fanatic, misfit Arabs who came and stayed'.
The result of these miscalculations, taken against the strong advice of expert analysts, including the author, and featuring lost opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden, enabled such disasters as September 11th and beyond to occur.
Clarke claims the Bush camp was fostered by the President's obsession with Saddam, an easier target than bin Laden, and his ignoring the warnings about the difficulty of running a 'free' Iraq.
"Could we have stopped the Sept 11 attack?" he asks. "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."
He adds, "Al Qaeda had emerged from the soil after the Cold War like some long dormant plague, it was on a path of its own, and it would not be swayed. And America, alas seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings."
So it went on to launch "an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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