Supporting player in the spotlight

Richard CLARKE’S revealing book “Against All Enemies” makes clear that he is perhaps the single most improbable hero American liberals have ever revered. Working inside the U.S. government, Clarke repeatedly urged leaders to set aside or evade the ban on political assassinations overseas. He was a strong believer in the use of U.S. military power. He was sorry that President Reagan didn’t respond with greater force to the attacks on Marines in Lebanon, that the first President Bush didn’t strike Libya after the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, that President Clinton didn’t send U.S. troops against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 1998. Abroad, Clarke worked hand-in-hand with Israeli defense officials. Inside Washington in the 1980s, he was a friend and bureaucratic ally of Richard Perle, the leading hawk in Reagan’s Pentagon, whom Clarke (by his own description) found charming.

Clarke also campaigned for an easing of the restrictions on domestic intelligence gathering by the FBI -- rules that were put into place in the 1970s after revelations of serious abuses. When, near the end of Clarke’s book, he gives a brief nod to the issue of civil liberties by (accurately) accusing George W. Bush’s administration of eviscerating them, Clarke’s proffered solution is a weak and bureaucratic one: Rather than imposing new limits on intelligence gathering, he suggests creating a “Civil Liberties and Security Board” to keep an eye on what the FBI is doing.

Some of his views might ordinarily be greeted with a dollop of skepticism were it not for the fact that Clarke was right, clearly and spectacularly so, about one big thing, the biggest of all: Al Qaeda and the threat its terrorism has posed to the United States. As Clinton’s counter-terrorism leader, Clarke argued that the administration wasn’t doing enough to combat the deadly sophistication of Osama bin Laden and his worldwide terrorist network; then, during the early months of the current Bush administration, Clarke famously warned that the existing efforts against terrorism were being given lower priority, even as Al Qaeda seemed to be preparing a major new attack on the United States.

“Against All Enemies” is the story of what it is like to be an obsessive personality and, at the same time, a Washington bureaucrat. The former entails a sense of urgency; the latter requires a sense of patience; and the resulting tension is the central drama of the book. Much attention has been given (rightly so) to Clarke’s first chapter, a gripping first-person account of the events inside the White House on Sept. 11 and 12, 2001, when Clarke took charge of the U.S. government’s minute-by-minute response to the plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet in its way, the entirety of the book tells an equally compelling story: It is a concise, fast-paced summary of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East and of the concomitant growth of terrorism against the United States. The narrative flows quickly, from the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 and the Iran-Iraq War to the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and the Al Qaeda bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and of the U.S. guided missile destroyer Cole in Yemen in October 2000.

This is, however, not history, but Clarke’s version of it. He emerges in his own book as a kind of Forrest Gump with cunning: He is the heretofore unrecognizable figure in the back of the picture at all the major events, but it turns out that he was also the central actor, the one who made the key discovery or fashioned the solution. In Clarke’s version, it was he who came up with the idea of giving the Afghani mujahedin the Stinger missiles that enabled them to shoot down Soviet helicopters, changing the course of the Cold War; it was he who first devised the idea of U.N. arms inspections for Iraq; it was he who uncovered the 1993 Iraqi plot to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait.

Occasionally, Clarke’s estimation of his own role and influence strains credulity. At one point in the late 1980s, he was dispatched to inform Israel that the United States wanted it to stop selling weaponry to South Africa’s apartheid government. Meeting in Tel Aviv with Israeli Gen. David Ivry, Clarke told the story of how, growing up in a non-Jewish family, he had witnessed as a child the evils of anti-Semitism; he then went on to explain to Ivry that racism is similarly evil. In Clarke’s account, the Israeli general saw the light. (Had no one ever told him this before?) A week later, with Ivry taking the lead, Israel cut its defense ties to South Africa. Despite Clarke’s dramatic story, it is doubtful that Israel really changed its national security policy in response to a lower-level U.S. official’s boyhood memories.

Among the best parts of Clarke’s book are its glimpses into how the U.S. government operates from day to day. It is full of faceless officials who rarely appear on television and stay on the job from one administration to another. Clarke was among the most tenacious and ambitious of these career civil servants -- and a master operator. “It was a good time to play the Washington game of seeking increased funding,” he says of one moment in 1996 -- delicately acknowledging that he was seeking to exploit for budgetary purposes two incidents (the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics and an explosion aboard a TWA jetliner off Long Island) that by Clarke’s own account had nothing to do with international terrorism. Clarke wanted to put the Counterterrorism Security Group, his own unit, in charge of everything, and he sometimes succeeded. His biggest frustrations were in dealing with the CIA and the FBI, the two huge bureaucracies with so much power that they could rebuff or ignore him. Clarke is scathing in his description of their ineptitude. Some key CIA officials, he says, believed he was exaggerating the threat from Al Qaeda.

There is a bit of irony here. At times, the belligerent mind-set Clarke displays in the book runs parallel to that of the neoconservatives, such as Clarke’s old friend Richard Perle. The neoconservatives saw the hand of Saddam Hussein as the prime mover behind terrorism against the United States; Clarke saw the hand of Al Qaeda. The neoconservatives saw themselves as a closely knit group, doing battle against a sluggish, complacent federal bureaucracy; Clarke believed that only he and a handful of others (mostly the counter-terrorism aides working for him) were in battle against the same bureaucracy. When Clarke argued in the late 1990s in favor of a policy of targeting Al Qaeda leaders for assassination, he said that this could be justified as a way of stopping an imminent attack. “What did ‘imminent’ mean?” Clarke asks in his book. “Did we have to know the exact date and location of the next Al Qaeda attack in order to use lethal force?” A few years later, neoconservatives such as Perle argued insistently that America had no time to waste, because Iraq, with its weapons of mass destruction (so they said), posed an imminent danger.

There is, however, one fundamental difference between Clarke and the neoconservatives. Both he and they were ardent hawks. But his warnings about the threat from Al Qaeda turned out to be well founded; theirs about the threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction did not. In dealing with the world, having solid evidence counts for a lot. *