Against All Enemies

My mom has piles of unread books on her desk that she obsessively buys - I like perusing them because they are invariably the "hot" non-fiction books - Zakaria's The Future of Freedom, the Master of the Senate, etc...I found Dick Clarke (not new years eve dick clarke, but Richard Clarke, the career civil servant who worked for the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II White House) and decided to read it as a brief hiatus from Lonesome Dove. He rails against the Bush adminstration for it's neglect of Al Queda prior to 9/11 and the misguided Iraq invasion. I found two things particularly annoying about his book. First, like most civil servants turned authors, he comes across like a know-it-all with the attitude had they only listened to me all of this would have been averted or at least had a better chance of being averted...he wanted to destroy the Republican Guard after Gulf War I. He wanted to eliminate Al Queda after the embassy bombings, he wanted to crush the Taliban on September 12th, he wanted to use the predator spy plane to kill Al Queda and the terrorist camps in Afghanistan before 9/11, and he wanted to beef up domestic security prior to 9/11. He never comes right out and says it, but implies had everyone just listened to him, we might have avoided the whole 9/11 and aftermath altogether. Too bad none of these decisions were his to make.

He thinks the Iraq invasion is hugely misguided. Like many others against the war he points to two facts: An Iraq and Al Queda link was never established and there were no WMD whereas there are in Pakistan and Iran. These were two factors in the Iraq invasion - but NOT the deciding or principal factors to many who supported the war. Never once in this entire book does he discuss the possible merits of a democratic Iraq - the country in the region with the highest level of education, with the best possibility of becoming a democratic model for the region. He discusses the need to win the ideological war, but offers no policies that would do that. Give more money to moderate voices in the Middle East. Yeah, like that's ever worked...He does not discuss what elections in Iraq and now in Palestine will do - what type of debate it has sparked, what type of model it poses for the rest of the region. He negates the elections as democracy at the tip of an America bayonnet - but does not discuss why this type of democracy is worse than say, a secular Fascist Baathist state who willfully scorns the rest of the world and the ramications of such behavior to other with similar attitudes.

But enough of the criticism. This book was a page-turner - I read in like three days or something. And there were some VERY interesting facts that despite having read all about it, I had not heard before.

1. Terry Nichols, the Oklahoma City bomb-maker had spend time in the Philippines - specifically in the city of Cebu. Is has been verified that he was there on the same couple of days as Ramsi Yousef and one of his partners in the first World Trade Center bombing prior to Oklahoma City, but after the first World Trade Center bombing in '93. Yousef is the cousin of Khalid Sheik Mohammed - KSM, the number 3 man in Al Queda, the one who came up with the 9/11 attacks who has subsequently been caught in Pakistan. He is the highest Al Queda guy we have caught. Yousef also was suspected of being an Iraqi intelligence agent and had an Iraqi passport when he bombed the World Trade Center in '93. This, coupled with Mohammed Atta's mysterious Prague meeting are the principal reasons some think Iraq may have been a partner in 9/11. It has NEVER been proven that Yousef was an Iraqi agent - it has been proven, however, that this was the first attack by Al Queda - before we even knew the name of Al Queda.

In any case, Nichols, we know had been trying to build a bomb prior to Oklahoma City but had not been successful. After he came back from the Philippines he was able to build a workable bomb.

No connection has ever been made between Nichols and Yousef - no contact ever established, no record of them ever crossing paths. But the mere fact that both men were in the same small city of Cebu in the Phillipines (both far away from either of their homes) on the same day and both men successfully bombed symbolic targets of the US government is an odd little fact in this era of terrorism.

2. The CIA. Clarke rails against the CIA for being too concerned with their own careers and catastrophes that could occur if they went after Bin Laden prior to 9/11. The CIA had been scorned both by Congress and the public for it's role in the Cold War, trying to assassinate unfriendly leaders in Latin America - Castro, Che, etc. Post Cold War, the CIA took the blame for these "un-American" activities long after the Presidents who ordered such tactics were gone from office. The CIA has been accused of (and probably guilty of), among other things, introducing crack cocaine to the inner city, trying to assassinate foreign leaders, participating in shady arms deals (Iran Contra) and so forth. The American public, ashamed of the dirty work the CIA performed, essentially cut off their balls - calling for a more "humane" spy service. Instead of hard nosed cold war badasses - we got bureacrats who acted safely, trying to not to cause too much trouble, and definately trying not to get their hands dirty. They wanted pensions and to feel like upstanding moral citizens of the world. Sadly, this did not protect Americans. Spying is a dirty, dirty business, done by dirty, oftentimes bad people. We can blame the CIA for failing to protect us prior to 9/11 - but the American public, I think, deserves some of the blame ourselves - for being too hunky-dory about the world...for being too morally relativistic, thinking that we don't have enemies, but misunderstood friends. Not true. We had and have enemies that need to be killed before they kill us. They are not misunderstood nor do they deserve a fair trial. What they deserve is not relevant. It is an issue of survival - how many of us get killed versus what it will cost us to get them to stop. After the Cold War and the ass-kicking-coalition that was Gulf War I, we thought ourselves above having enemies. We were wrong.