Given the howling political fire-storm in the US over Richard A. Clarke's new book, Against All Enemies, it is surprising how familiar many of his assertions sound, his recitation of pre-9/11 antiterrorism missteps by the US President George W. Bush and former president Bill Clinton administrations echoing earlier books and old newspaper and magazine articles. Had it not appeared during the presidential campaign season, had members of the Bush administration not so vociferously attacked its author, had Clarke not appeared ubiquitously on TV as a whistle-blower, the volume might not have become the incendiary bestseller that it is.
Many of its most debated charges about the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism have been leveled before. Some have been corroborated or openly acknowledged by other members of the administration. The difference between what Clarke is saying and what earlier accounts have said seems to be largely a matter of inflection, timing and emphasis.
Clarke's accusation that before 9/11 the Bush White House did not address the danger of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda with urgency is echoed by the president's own remarks in Bob Woodward's 2002 book, Bush at War, in which he said he "was not on point" before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
Woodward's book, which drew upon extensive interviews with members of the administration and painted a sympathetic portrait of the president as a commanding leader, also presaged Clarke's assertions that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz began pushing the case for war against Iraq in the days immediately after 9/11.
As for Clarke's charges that the Bush administration was preoccupied with matters other than terrorism (like China and missile defense) during its first eight months in office, these, too, have been heard before. In 2002, after revelations about intelligence failures, many newspaper and magazine articles said the same thing.
A Newsweek article that May said: "The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden, among other actions."
The narrative of Against All Enemies is very much a story in which Clarke depicts himself as the prescient gunslinger trying, often in vain, to rally a bunch of dilatory bureaucrats. This can result in some self-dramatizing moments, as when he describes thrusting his "Secret Service-issued .357 sidearm" into his belt as he dressed to go to work at the White House the day after 9/11. But there is also genuine passion in his descriptions of his fights over three decades with a lumbering, risk-averse federal bureaucracy, hobbled with committees and subcommittees charged with coming up with plans for more initiatives and agendas.
One of the things that has opened Clarke to criticism is his "you are there" narrative, which recreates entire scenes, like the day of Sept. 11 at the White House, complete with dialogue. In addition, some of his interpretations of other people's reactions are clearly patronizing and off base.
Clarke -- who worked for the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush -- was known to his colleagues for his hard-driving, take-no-prisoners style, and he describes himself in these pages as an Ahab, obsessively pursuing the white whale of Osama bin Laden.
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