Review of Richard A. Clarke. Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. New York: Free Press, 2004.

            During the 2004 9/11 Commission hearings, perhaps the most juxtaposed testimony occurred within the same week in the appearances of Richard A. Clarke and the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Condileeza Rice. Mr. Clarke, head of the National Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG) for almost a decade, testified that throughout the first eight months of the first Administration of President George W. Bush he tried repeatedly to raise the issue of the Al-Qaeda threat to his boss, Ms. Rice.

            Mr. Clarke’s futile attempts to convince the National Security Advisor to let him address a meeting of the Prinicipals (Cabinet officers) on terrorism led him to request a transfer in the summer of 2001. Ms. Rice appointed Mr. Clarke to another area of responsibility on the Council, the head of Cyber and Infrastructure Security, to be effective in October 2001.

            Despite an intelligence warning of an impending Al-Qaeda attack inside the United States in August of 2001, a meeting of the Bush Cabinet on terrorism was not convened until one week before the September 11 attacks. Until that time, of all the top foreign policy officers in the Bush Administration, only Secretary of State Colin Powell, his deputy Richard Armitage, and CIA Director George Tenet showed any urgency to address the issue of spectacular terrorism. The other political appointees concentrated their focus on the presumed threat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

            Ms. Rice countered Clarke’s testimony with her own version of the truth of the events during the course of 2001 . The beginning of Mr. Clarke’s memoir, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, shows how Clarke managed the White House response on September 11^th as director of the CSG. That day, Mr. Clarke witnessed during an in-person briefing Vice President Dick Cheney hanging up the phone in his bomb shelter and Lynn Cheney turning down the volume on the CSG government wide teleconference so she could listen to CNN.

            Clarke started his government career in the early 1970's working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, rising through civil service ranks to enter the George H. W. Bush White House in 1992 to first work on terrorism. As Clarke formed and directed the CSG under President Bill Clinton, the government became increasingly aware of the threat of terrorism. Islamist radical terrorist attacks against Americans in the Middle East and Africa in the 1990's announced Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war against the Great Satan .

            The CSG, and President Clinton were schocked to learn how unprepared America was to respond to attacks within the United States during the preparations for the 1996 International Olympics in Atlanta. It wasn’t even until Osama bin Laden had been operating with his organization, and killing Americans for many years that the U.S. intelligence even knew of the existence of Al-Qaeda; and they still knew very little about how it operated until the late 1990's

            Besides the terrorist themselves, Clarke, without stating it, identifies two villains that stymied America’s efforts to take the offensive against the enemies. First, there was the Central Intelligence Agency. Despite the efforts of Director Tenet to press his bureaucracy, the CIA planners vetoed almost every effort at military or covert action inside the terrorist sanctuaries in Sudan and Afghanistan because of fears of collateral damage or failure from unforseen circumstances.

            The second villain in the memoir is also institutional: the political leadership of the G. W. Bush Administration, excluding Mr. Powell and Mr. Armitage. Early in the new regime, during a meeting on terrorism with sub-cabinet officials, Clarke was flabbergasted by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s attempt to revive a long discredited theory of Iraqi ties to terrorism. The new administration’s focus, as it was apparent to the author, was eliminating Saddam Hussein.

            If there is hero within Against All Enemies, Clarke, although clearly a heroic figure, doesn’t claim the role for himself. He portrays himself as a humble civil servant fulfilling the oath of office he took: to protect American against all enemies, foreign or domestic. No, the hero talked about is the unlikely and reluctant commander-in-chief, Mr. Clinton.

            President Clinton approved every action to destroy Al-Qaeda anywhere they could be found. Clinton also approved and funded Clarke’s plan after the fiasco of preparing for the 1996 Olympics to strengthen America’s homeland defenses against possible nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. Ultimately, like the Bush II agenda, it was politics that prevented America from destroying Al-Qaeda when cause in 1998 and opportunity through 2000 presented themselves. It was the partisan attacks on the president and Mr. Clinton’s impeachment trial that opened him up to “Wag the Dog” public criticism and sapped the president’s authority and perhaps his will to deal decisively with Osama bin Laden and his associates.