Iraq and Afghanistan

Richard Clarke of Congressional Hearing fame was the leading person in the war against terrorism before 2002. His book, now more than a year old, tells of his struggles within several administrations to get them to listen to him and his friends, a cabal within government that was obsessed with the danger to the country of terrorists, and particularly of Ussama bin Ladin and al-Qaida. He got further with the Clinton people than he did with the Bush, even though he was for a time allowed to continue his work alongside Bush's National Security Council. Bush's people never took him or his ideas seriously. There were many reasons, but one important one was that they simply did not accept ideas or issues or approaches that they associated with the Clinton years.

He is a harsh critics of many of the entrenched persons and approaches of the FBI and CIA, as well as the too predictable reactions of the Pentagon and the military brass. Many heroes from these agencies shine through the narrative, but the overall picture is negative. The CIA and the FBI and their subdivisions remain more interested in turf than in the national interest. The Homeland Security Department was a failure from the beginning: poorly planned, poorly staffed, given impossible jobs with no additional money and very little time to accomplish its objectives. His harshest criticism is of those in the Administration who came into office determined to conquer Iraq no matter what. For them, 9/11 was a handy excuse. This may have not been the case with Bush himself, but he sees Bush as an essentially unfocused figurehead unwilling to really try to understand anything. Our conquest and continued involvement in Iraq has enflamed the Islamic world and trained a new generation of terrorists much as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan did. The reader has probably heard these opinions of Clarke from the news media and his appearances before Congress. On the negative side, in the book he appears self-interested, conceited, cocksure of everything. He no doubt overinflates his importance at critical junctures in the story. One might not like working with Clarke, but fundamentally he means well, is very knowledgeable, and should be listed to.

He believes the country should be spending a great deal more on homeland security than it does. Even the first responders have been starved for funds (NYPD had to reduce its police force after 9/11). New intelligence resources, even a new analytic agency should be developed, preferably separate from the CIA and the FBI, but possible housed within the latter. Someone has to deal intelligently with the intelligence stream and no one is! He would like to see us spend more on the propaganda wars, doing the kind of things that we managed to do in the cold war in our struggle against communism. He is a little too sanguine about efforts to reform Islam from the outside, but he is more helpful when he agrees with Anonymous on the necessity of modifying our actions in the Middle East in a way that will reduce hatred.

His identifies the countries we should be targeting in the region as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. He considers Iran to have been and be much more important in the support of terrorism (Hezbollah especially) and the development of nuclear weapons than Iraq. This does not mean that we should invade Iran. It means that we should take it more seriously through an approach that would work both with the present leadership and work to replace that leadership. He agrees with Friedman (today's Op-Ed) that Iran has a large number of pro-Americans. We have to help them create a democratic state. But we must do it in a way that does not seem to make Iranian students into CIA agents. I agree, but it is a difficult proposition..