Of US Vice President Dick Cheney, Clarke writes that "below that surface calm ran strong, almost extreme beliefs." He describes Bush as looking for "the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem" and asserts that Bush felt a need "to `do something big' to respond to the events of Sept. 11," a need filled by going to war against Iraq.
He is scathing about the FBI and its director, Louis Freeh, who he says rarely "did anything eagerly that the White House had asked him to do" during the Clinton administration. And he is weirdly contradictory on the subject of the CIA and George Tenet, its director, complaining that the agency was laggard in its pursuit of al-Qaeda "in sharp contrast" to its director's "personal fixation" on the terrorist group.
Although Clarke chastises the Clinton administration for failing to follow through on its bombing campaign of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, which might have eliminated Osama bin Laden and curtailed al-Qaeda, he suggests that it was more committed to the fight against terrorism than its successor.
At the end of this book Clarke argues that the war against Iraq has undermined the war against al-Qaeda and spawned further hatred of the US in the Islamic world. He also argues that the Bush administration should have been paying more attention to four other volatile countries in the region: Afghanistan (where the Taliban is now resurgent), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
If the US does not grapple with the problems in these countries, he warns, "we face the prospect of the following scenario by 2007: A Taliban-like government in Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons, supporting a similar satellite nation next door in Afghanistan and promoting al-Qaeda-like ideology and terror throughout the world; in the gulf, a nuclear-armed Iran, promoting its own version of Hezbollah-style ideology; and Saudi Arabia after the fall of the House of Saud, creating its own version of a 14th-century theocratic republic."
This vision, a reverse image of the democratic domino theory envisioned by some proponents of the Iraq war, may sound like a far-fetched nightmare. But then Clarke's pre-9/11 warning of "a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead" once seemed like a far-fetched nightmare, too.
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