April 10
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, Richard Clarke (2004)

Richard Clarke is the former "counterterrorism czar" who was all over the news last month, when they were still arguing about whether Condoleezza Rice would testify before the 9/11 commission. His Against All Enemies (the title refers to the federal office-holder's oath to defend the U.S. Constitution "against all enemies") was the book that preceded Bob Woodward's new one as the anti-Bush book du jour.

This one has been languishing on my to-do list for a while. As you can see from my title line, it's been two weeks since I finished it, and I actually read about 90% of the book another week before that. I like to think of it not as a review I wrote too late, but a book I read too early. Typically I don't read politically topical books until a few months (or more) after they've fallen out of the spotlight. This is the first one that I read as soon as it came out since -- well, ever.

Among my happy discoveries about the King County Library is that they enter a book in their database as soon as it is put on order, which is frequently long before the book is published. You can put a hold on any book in the data base, so you don't have to wait for the book's publication to get in line to reserve a copy. Hundreds of others discovered this secret before I did and make use of it, which is why I'm still in line for some popular recent releases. (I got a notice just last night that my hold for Ron Suskind's Paul O'Neill book has finally come through.)

Not that it was really a surprise, but it was strange to experience just how different the media buzz about a book can be from the book itself. From watching news shows and reading blogs, one would imagine that Against All Enemies is a partisan attack against Bush in which a disgruntled insider reveals that prior to 9/11 the administration was negligent in preparing against terrorism, and after 9/11 it was obsessed only with invading Iraq. It must be admitted that the publisher is entirely complicit in this representation, which presumably was calculated as the approach most likely to result in enormous sales. The blurbs and quotations on the book cover, repeated in the marketing materials, shines a bright focus on exactly those points. The inside-cover text comes perilously close to misrepresenting the author -- not that such a thing would be unprecedented -- thoughtfully telling us ahead of time what conclusions we should draw from the book, complete with alarmist adjectives like "disastrous" and "most disturbing".

Clarke does, in fact, reveal an administration which is intent on invading Iraq and not as interested in terrorism as Clarke would like it to be, but these come in the course of a larger story which has a rather different tone. Fundamentally, this book is a personal story, in which Clarke relates his own experience leading the federal government's effort against terrorism. This, and not the various nuggets with partisan value which can be pried from the story like silver fillings pried from a fallen comrade's teeth, is what makes the book worth reading. Clarke was as "insider" as any individual could be on the fight against terrorism, and it's fascinating to see it from his point of view.

Of his many interesting stories, most enlightening is his first-hand account of the immediate response on the morning of September 11, 2001. Among other things, we get a perfectly logical explanation for the President's strange flights around the country that day. We also learn that officials knew almost immediately that al-Qaeda was responsible, even though it was quite a while before they came out and blamed them publicly. I don't have any notes from back then, but I remember that for the first day or two we were saying that officials shouldn't be hinting that Islamists were responsible if they didn't have the evidence. In fact, they did have the evidence; they just hadn't made it public yet.

The author is indeed disgruntled, but not in the partisan way so often suggested. Clarke is a consummate career bureaucrat, and an extremely competent one. That means, for starters, that he is equally at ease working for Democrats or Republicans. Presidential administrations come and go, but career bureaucrats labor on. Whatever personal political views Clarke may have, his life is in a culture where it is natural to set them aside. His indignation when Move On used him for their political ads on behalf of Kerry against Bush was genuine.

Being non-partisan is not the same as being non-political, however. As a successful bureaucrat, Clarke is extremely political -- but that's politics in the sense that you might say that operation within any large organization is "political", not partisan politics of the electoral kind. Clarke is very good at this non-partisan brand of politics. He knows how to be brutal when it pays to be brutal and how to be obsequious when it pays to be obsequious, and he is a master at gathering allies from competing organizations.

Clarke's enemies, then, are not those on the wrong side of the ideological spectrum. His enemies are anyone who gets in the way of him and his mission, and his friends are anyone who helps. Now that he has retired and is writing his "tell-all" memoirs, he can be scathing to his enemies. But Clarke is not one for direct attacks, and still less for obscenities or vicious language. In his case being scathing takes the form of a polite but disdainful tone which says, "I honestly can't understand how these people could be so stupid as to not understand that" ("that" being whatever Clarke has determined is right).

Clarke's political disdain doesn't fall exactly where the media circus might have led one to believe. Bush and Rice, most in the news, do get some unflattering portrayals, but they aren't the foremost ones, and they're balanced by occasional kind words as well. Since smart and stupid are, for Clarke, defined as working with him or against him, a colleague's status might change from episode to episode. Condoleezza Rice, for example, doesn't fare so well when she's ignoring Clarke's memos before 9/11 or passing on the news that his department has been bumped down to subcabinet level. On the other hand, on the morning of 9/11, when Rice chooses to step aside and let Clarke run the immediate response team, she's a genius to have made such a wise, brave, and magnanimous decision. On the whole, I'd say that Paul Wolfowitz (undersecretary of Defense) and Louis Freeh (FBI director) come out the worst. And the only reason Wolfowitz gets more flak than Rumsfeld is that Clarke rarely gets to see Rumsfeld.

Clarke's own political views, insofar as they can be gleaned here, seem to me to run more closely to Republican than Democrat. His evident dislike for the Bush administration, I think, has much more to do with governing style than ideology. Simply put, the Bush administration is a hostile environment for a career bureaucrat. More than most presidencies, the Bush team favors political appointees; it channels power toward them and away from the non-partisan bureaucrats. The Bush approach to government favors incorporating partisan ideology into decision-making. Clarke positively thrived under the Clinton administration -- not because he was more Democrat than Republican, but because Clinton's wonky and process-minded style of governing was exactly the sort of environment where a man with Clarke's talents would rise to the top and be able to exert real power. Under Bush's system it was the opposite; Clarke was gradually pushed further out of power until he resigned.

This, I think, is the book's most important revelation about the Bush administration. It's not a blunt policy question, nor a matter of whether someone was negligent. It's that Bush's White House has a distinct management style, and Clarke's memoir displays some ramifications of this style.

The two anti-Bush criticisms which the media trumpeted about this book -- that Bush didn't do enough to prevent 9/11 and that immediately after 9/11 he was already planning to invade Iraq -- need not have been controversial at all if Bush had just admitted to both right away. It's a simple enough matter to acknowledge that not enough was done before 9/11. Whenever such a big tragedy happens, everyone feels, "Gosh, I wish I had foreseen that so I could have done something about it." To voice that feeling needn't come across as an admission of guilt, and it would have been the most natural thing to do for anyone who doesn't have "it's not my fault" as a kneejerk reaction to everything.

The critics would then follow up by pointing out that Richard Clarke foresaw it and sent all those memos, etc. To that, Bush could point out that there are dozens of people in the federal government shouting about some pet issue or another. Richard Clarke's obsession was Islamist terrorism, but there are any number of other guys obsessed with some other equally plausible threat. In retrospect, it turns out that Clarke was the one who was right, but what if it turned out to be a rogue nuke stolen from Kazakhstan, a right-wing militia nut machine-gunning Congress, a meltdown at a nuclear power plant? Then Clarke would be among the many who were looking in the wrong place, and there would be some other guy saying, "I told you so." Just about any outcome is predicted by someone. It doesn't mean we were all foolish because we didn't listen to the guy who predicted that the Florida Marlins would win the World Series.

As for the "revelation" that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al were ready to invade Iraq by Sept 12, what's the point in denying it? Whether you agree with him or not, Bush obviously felt that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Even now, he's still saying it was the right thing to do. What's so hard about saying that those reasons were just as applicable on Sept 12 as any other day?

The misportrayal of Against All Enemies as another anti-Bush book has left some with the perverse impression that Clarke is some sort of anti-war advocate. He most certainly is not. Clarke is a hawk, and in my view a pretty severe one.

Like everyone these days, Clarke uses the term "terrorist" a lot. When reading the book, I took a keen interest in trying to decipher exactly what he means by the term. That's a larger topic for another day. For now, suffice it to say that Clarke's enemy is militant Islamism. ("Islamism" is an ungainly term, but it's exactly what I mean. It is a political ideology which seeks to make a strict interpretation of Islam the basis for political rule. This is not the same as plain "Islam", nor "radical Islam", "militant Islam" or "Islamic fundamentalism".)

Here is how Clarke states it:

I might quibble with several of the details here, but in the generality he's not far off. The last sentence is a bit of a caricature, and if "fourteenth-century" is read to imply that they eschew modern technology it's certainly wrong. My other quibbles are pretty much identical to my quibbles with how hard-core cold warriors viewed communism: I think the claim, by their opponents and by themselves, that communist movements around the world were part of a united global movement was more rhetorical than actual. A third-world communist like, say, Daniel Ortega espoused an economic ideology more or less in line with Soviet Russia's, and he was happy to make use of Soviet aid, but I don't think he had much interest in an international movement that encompassed Angola, Vietnam and Bulgaria. I think he just wanted to take over Nicaragua. Likewise for the numerous splinter Islamist movements in Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, etc. These groups aren't so much interested in a Caliphate as just changing their own country. (And by the way, history news flash: the times when all the Islamic nations of the world really wanted to be united under a single government are few and far between. No, even less than that. There was only one such time, and it ended with the murder of 'Ali in AD 661.)

The distinction is noteworthy, I think. If one believes that all Islamist movements are united and are actively seeking to dominate the entire globe, then it makes perfect sense to want to fight them at every turn. If one believes that some Islamism is local and not anti-American, then one can safely ignore little Islamist movements that have no quarrel with us (or quarrel with us only when we have soldiers in their country) and focus on the ones that are actually attacking us (ie, al-Qaeda). Deep down, Clarke considers all Islamists the enemy -- certainly he doesn't hesitate to attach the "terrorist" label to pretty much anyone in favor of making shari'a state law -- but he is a practical man, and as a practical matter, he concentrates his attentions on those groups which are the greatest threat to do actual damage to America. That means al-Qaeda and its close allies.

In his pursuit of this war, Clarke pulls no punches. As soon as he discovered that al-Qaeda operatives were training in Afghanistan, he wanted to bomb the hell out of all the camps. Questions of cost or legality didn't faze him. The bad guys were there and by golly they should be killed. This objective -- his famous "Delenda plan", named after Roman senator Cato the Elder's equally obsessive mantra "Delenda est Carthago" -- became the center of Clarke's universe. When his team was downgraded to subcabinet level, he was furious not so much for his own ego (which is large but not insecure) as because it would make it that much harder for him to persuade anyone to bomb the camps in Afghanistan.

Oliver North, a famously rule-breaking foreign policy adventurer from the Reagan era, gets a few mentions in the book, and none of them are flattering. Clarke's complaints about North, are (1) he sold weapons to Iranian terrorists, and (2) as a result of his chicanery and refusal to follow the rules, the government laid down more rules which were even stricter. Note that Clarke does not object to Oliver North breaking the law per se, only that by doing so he created a mess that made the job tougher for those who follow him.

Insofar as Clarke respects the law and the rules, it's because he is thorough and meticulous. If there is a rule against doing something, you can't just ignore it, because it might be a trap that makes things worse. A rule is a wall that stands between him and his objective. It requires proper study to know whether the best course of action is to climb over it, sneak under it, tunnel through it, or arrange to have it torn down. But to simply slam into it might bring it crashing down on your head.

Clarke is fascinated by those who can get things done. On the one and only occasion that he speaks highly of FBI Director Louis Freeh, it is for the devious way in which Freeh gets a certain al-Qaeda accomplice into custody. Hani el-Sayegh, living in Canada, had been identified as an accomplice in the bombing of Khobar Towers, a building in Saudi Arabia where U.S. Air Force personnel were housed. Freeh wanted to plea bargain with el-Sayegh, in the usual FBI way, hoping he'd offer up evidence against someone else. So the FBI brought him to the United States for questioning. Clarke thought that was a bad idea, because the FBI had absolutely no evidence against el-Sayegh. Sure enough, as soon as el-Sayegh realized that, he refused to cooperate, and his lawyer petitioned for his release. At this point Freeh springs the trick which Clarke admires: he detains el-Sayegh on the grounds that he is in the United States illegally, without proper papers -- in spite of the fact that it was the FBI who brought him here, and getting the hell out is exactly what el-Sayegh is trying to do! Clarke describes this as "real creativity".

He offers similar praise for Al Gore in this episode:

Ha ha. Good one, Al. Now we know why Clarke voted for Gore in 2000. It wasn't for the environment.

One thing that makes this book different from just about every other political memoir I've read is that there is absolutely zero reference to any family, either past or present. If Clarke has a wife or significant other, you'd never know it. I think this is what White House character assassins were getting at when they dropped dark hints about his "weird" personal life. Some interpreted this as innuendo that Clarke is gay. To me it looks more like he is a solitary geek with no social life at all.

Some stray passages that I took note of:

Quoting Norman Schwarzkopf, general in the 1991 Iraq War: "The bombing missions I am running are eliminating Iraqi units that will kill American troops if those Iraqis are still alive when the ground war starts." Notice that Iraqis are "eliminated" while Americans are "killed." This is typical.

Clarke has no qualms with the tactic of political assassination. Throughout the story, he is always eager to kill Osama bin Laden any way possible, and likewise for other terrorist leaders. To Clarke, this is a perfectly normal way to pursue the conflict. Later, when he finds out that al-Qaeda has put out a contract targeting him specifically, he is equally unfazed. Of course he doesn't like being put in greater danger, but he betrays no outrage at the idea of assassination as a legitimate tactic. It only makes him more determined to kill bin Laden first.

Immediately following the explosion of TWA flight 800 -- which turned out to be a genuine accident, but at the time was suspected as an act of terrorism -- Clarke is with President Clinton at the airport. He tells how he retreated to a side room and accidentally interrupted Hillary Clinton, who was "alone in the room, on her knees ... praying." He mentions this simply, without any fanfare, but to me the image of Mrs Clinton praying seems incongruous with how she is commonly portrayed by both her admirers and her enemies.

The bombings in Oklahoma City and at the Atlanta Olympics each have their stories told, but Clarke isn't much interested in non-Islamist terrorism. Once the culprit is identified as home-grown, he seems to lose interest. This is reinforced in a passage where he is criticizing the 56 FBI field offices for being insufficiently focused on al-Qaeda: "Instead, they were following whatever terrorist organization was making itself obvious. In some cases it was the Irish Republican Army, in others it was Indian Sikhs, or domestic militias." It seem to me that if you're an FBI field office in, say, Boise, it probably makes good sense to be worrying more about domestic militias than al-Qaeda. Throughout his brief celebrity, Clarke has been showcased for his single-minded focus on fighting terrorism. It's really a single-minded focus on fighting Islamist terrorism.

Only one new word that I remember: demarches. The singular is demarche, not demarch. It's a fancy French-like term for a diplomatic maneuver. Only one typo that I remember ("Soutwest"). At one point "bicep" is used as a singular noun, a back-formation which is gradually becoming more and more common.

The typeface is Trump, which I recognized easily and remembered as a popular face in the early 1980s, when I used to work as a typesetter. Presumably this is a newer cut of it. It has lovely ligatures for fi and fl which we didn't have in the old days.

Throughout the book, the first name of Osama bin Laden is spelled "Usama." If this were part of a larger scheme of transliteration, it would make sense. Arabic has three vowels. In scholarly transliterations, these are rendered as a, i, and u, and the other two vowels are never seen at all. Scholarly transliterations are typically considered too advanced for the lay reader, so books intended for a general audience usually have some compromise scheme which balances scholarly practice against tradition and simplicity.

Like medieval Latin, modern Arabic is a multinational language with a written standard and a wide range of regional pronunciations. As Europeans came into contact with Arab-speaking cultures and transliterated words and names to the Roman alphabet, the variety of Arabic pronunciations combined with the variety of European alphabetic traditions to produce a double variety of spellings for Arabic and Arabic-derived names.

Gradually, since then, many of the more common words and names are converging toward a standard. In most cases, the trend is toward a simplified version of the scholarly transliteration, which includes restricting vowels to the standard three. That is the logic by which "Moslem" and "Mohammed" have given way to "Muslim" and "Muhammad". For some words, however, traditional spellings are too strong. A purist publication like National Geographic will write "Makkah" on a map of Arabia -- just as it will write "Moskva" and "Athínai" in Russia and Greece -- but almost everyone else will stick with the old-fashioned "Mecca". Similarly, the name of the former president of Egypt ought to be spelled something like "Jamal Abdulnasir", but instead it's usually "Gamal Abdel Nasser". (Properly, if your browser can make sense of all my Unicode codes, he is Jamal ʿAbd al-Nāṣir.)

Prior to gaining notoriety after 9/11, Osama bin Laden was known alternately as "Osama" or "Usama." The usual pattern would point to "Usama" as the more correct spelling, but for some reason "Osama" is the one that stuck. Clarke's book is the first popular work I've seen to use the "Usama" spelling. If it were part of a larger pattern, this might be a first step in bringing "Usama" in line with the standard. Instead the book takes a step in the other direction with spellings like "Hezbollah" and "Koran" (not to mention "bin Laden" rather than "bin Ladin"). One can only conclude that Clarke insisted on using the spellings that he is most familiar with, regardless of any inconsistency or how affected it would look to the reader.

The total number of books I borrow from library are roughly twice those that I finish and report on here. Many of them I renew once, which at the King County Library gives me a total of eight weeks. I honestly don't know if I'm allowed a second renewal. I figure that if I haven't finished a book in eight weeks, I may as well give up and send it back. I can always try again later.

One which I had for a while earlier this year was M.E. Yapp's The Near East Since the First World War, a follow-up volume to Yapp's The Making of the Modern Near East, which I had borrowed from the San Francisco public library last year and consider to be the best general history available for the Ottoman area in the empire's declining years. In the introduction, Yapp has a delightful note on transliteration which turns the usual note on its head:

I love that.

By the way, I'll be curious to know how well the special characters turn out. In Mr Nasser's fancy-spelled name above, there should be a macron (horizontal line) over the last a and a dot under the s, and the thing before "Abd" should look like the left half of a raised circle. Drop me a line telling me what you get, and tell me also what browser and operating system you're using.

On my system they work in about half of my fonts, presumably the ones fully equipped with Unicode. Curiously, this does not include the ones Apple OS X categorizes as "Web" fonts (Georgia, Verdana, etc). On the ones that do display the symbols, it only looks nice on a couple of them. For the rest it looks like symbols are stolen from other fonts, and they don't quite fit. I've added to my template a new style definition for names requiring Unicode, but I'm only guessing which fonts to list in defining it.

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