America should heed Clarke's warnings

Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies is one very scary book. Unlike most people who have an opinion on it, I've read the book.

It is understandable that the administration has become hysterical in its attacks on Clarke. If his account is accurate, then the president is a man of limited talents, capable of absorbing only simple proposals and surrounded by advisers from Cloud Cuckooland. Yet for all the viciousness of the assault, no one has explained why a registered Republican civil servant who has served in five administrations, three of them Republican, would write such a book unless he was genuinely worried about the state of the country. As for it being a partisan political book, it would have been published last November, a year before the election, if a security check on it was not deemed necessary. Clarke's story fits with that of Paul O'Neill, the former secretary of the Treasury, who describes the same kind of White House. One can only hope that enough Americans take seriously the possibility that Clarke is telling the truth before al-Qaida blows up some American commuter trains.

Even more scary is the implication of the book that Americans are not much safer than they were in August 2001. The two agencies with primary responsibility for security -- the CIA and the FBI -- are apparently paralyzed by bureaucratic concerns about their turf. The former in particular seems worse than useless and its computer system doesn't work very well, if at all. The Department of Homeland Security has no control over either agency and has become, as many predicted it would, a cumbersome monstrosity. Clarke suggests that the billions of dollars pumped into the Iraq war could have been spent notably improving the domestic war against terrorism or setting up a single police agency to deal specifically with domestic terrorism.

Apparently, Condoleezza Rice had never heard of al-Qaida when she came to the White House. Her major concern seemed to be that there were too many employees in the counter-terrorism group. The administration was not interested in such notions as the war on terror, which it had inherited from the previous administration. Rather, it worried about China and a missile defense system.

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