Dick Clarke: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Good . . .
As the top National Security Council staffer on counterterrorism for the last decade–and a career national security bureaucrat for the last 30 years–Richard Clarke had a ringside seat from which to view the full catastrophe of Osama bin Laden’s war on America. His efforts to stir a more forceful U.S. response to al Qaeda were described in these pages two months ago by Richard H. Shultz Jr. (“Showstoppers,” Jan. 26, 2004). Here is Shultz’s description of the frustrations Clarke faced:
One of the hardest of the hard-liners was the group’s chief, Dick Clarke. For nearly a decade, this career civil servant began and ended his workday with the burgeoning terrorist threat to America. He knew in detail the danger the bin Ladens of the world posed, and it worried him greatly. Defensive measures were just not enough. “Clarke’s philosophy was to go get the terrorists,” one former senior Pentagon special operations official told me, “Go get them anywhere you can.” . . .
Clarke was not alone. Mike Sheehan also pushed for assisting the Northern Alliance and striking al Qaeda with SOF [special forces]. Such measures worried the senior brass, who proceeded to weaken those officials by treating them as pariahs. That meant portraying them as cowboys, who proposed reckless military operations that would get American soldiers killed.
Sheehan explained: Suppose one civilian starts beating the drum for special operations. The establishment “systematically starts to undermine you. They would say, ‘He’s a rogue, he’s uncooperative, he’s out of control, he’s stupid, he makes bad choices.’ It’s very damaging. . . . You get to the point where you don’t even raise issues like that. If someone did, like me or Clarke, we were labeled cowboys, way outside our area of competence.”
Several officials who served on the Joint Staff and in the Pentagon’s special operations office remembered the senior brass characterizing Clarke in such terms. “Anything Dick Clarke suggested, the Joint Staff was going to be negative about,” said one. Some generals had been vitriolic, calling Clarke “a madman, out of control, power hungry, wanted to be a hero, all that kind of stuff.” In fact, one of these former officials emphasized, “when we would carry back from the counterterrorism group one of those SOF counterterrorism proposals, our job was to figure out not how to execute it, but how we were going to say no.”
By turning Clarke into a pariah, the Pentagon brass discredited precisely the options that might have spared us the tragedy of September 11. And when Clarke fought back at being branded “wild” and “irresponsible,” they added “abrasive” and “intolerant” to the counts against him.
Clarke was similarly well placed in the critical first year of the Bush administration. Let’s fast forward to an August 2002 press briefing unearthed last week by Fox News’s Jim Angle, when Clarke was still on the Bush NSC staff. Clarke was asked about accusations that animus to the Clinton administration had made the Bush administration unwilling to take suggestions from their predecessors on going after al Qaeda:
ANGLE: You’re saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?
CLARKE: All of that’s correct.
There was every reason, then, given Clarke’s unique vantage point, to expect that his memoirs would one day provide an authoritative account of what went wrong (and what went right) in the long war with al Qaeda.
The Bad . . .
The appearance of Clarke’s Against All Enemies last week betrayed those expectations. First, the simple fact that Clarke, who resigned in January 2003, should rush to publish his volume before the end of Bush’s first term is a precedent-setting act of bad faith from a National Security Council staffer who reports on conversations with the president and his national security adviser.
It’s no surprise that the Washington press corps hasn’t lingered over this breach of trust. They were no doubt the recipients of so many leaks from Clarke through the years that it would be an act of deep ingratitude for them to criticize the man now. It’s a bit shortsighted of alleged defenders of good government (viz. the New York Times editorial page) not to notice the fact that Clarke has singlehandedly all but guaranteed a partisan purge of national security staff in future transitions.
And the Ugly
But the real disappointment is that whole chunks of Clarke’s book sound as if they were dictated by Sidney Blumenthal, the most partisan and conspiratorial of the Clintonites. When Clarke says in his preface that he will tell the story of “Bill Clinton, who identified terrorism as the major post-Cold War threat and acted to improve our counterterrorism capabilities; who (little known to the public) quelled anti-American terrorism by Iraq and Iran and defeated an al Qaeda attempt to dominate Bosnia; but who, weakened by continued political attack, could not get the CIA, the Pentagon, and FBI to act sufficiently to deal with the threat”–he is echoing the thesis of Blumenthal, whose tedious 2003 memoir The Clinton Wars blamed all of Clinton’s failures in combatting al Qaeda on Clinton’s political foes. Both books tell some of the same supposedly Clinton-exculpating anecdotes:
What was particularly frustrating was that Clinton had pulled Joint Staffs Chairman Hugh Shelton and me aside after the Cabinet Room meeting, saying to the former Special Forces commander, “Hugh, what I think would scare the shit out of these al Qaeda guys, more than any cruise missile . . . would be the sight of U.S. commandoes, Ninja guys in black suits, jumping out of helicopters into their camps, spraying machine guns. Even if we don’t get the big guys, it will have a good effect.” Shelton looked pained. He explained that the camps were a long way away from anywhere we could launch a helicopter raid. Nonetheless, America’s top military officer agreed to “look into it.” (Clarke, Against All Enemies, pp. 189-190)
Still frustrated, President Clinton tried to get the Pentagon to think about a Special Forces operation. In late 1999, he suggested to [Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh] Shelton, “You know, it would scare the shit out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp. It would get us enormous deterrence and show those guys we’re not afraid.” But Shelton “blanched”: The generals subsequently argued to the NSC that a small operation was too risky: “The White House had little recourse; it would not work to order the military to undertake a mission it believed to be suicidal.” (Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars, p. 661)
Then there’s the condescending character assassination (also a Blumenthalian touch): “As I briefed [National Security Adviser Condi Rice] on al Qaeda, her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard of the term before.” (She had in fact heard of and used the term.) Clarke’s new fans on the Bush-bashing left preposterously demand that his book deserves serious rebuttal. Fine. To paraphrase Clarke: As we read his book, he gives us the impression that he is as obsessed with destroying the Bush presidency as he once was with destroying al Qaeda. Too bad.
