A national treasure with a blowtorch
YOUR GOVERNMENT FAILED YOU:
Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters
By Richard A. Clarke
358 pp. Ecco $25.95
Reviewed by Jack Shakely
Reviewing any nonfiction book that mixes fact and opinion requires going outside the book’s cover to look at the author. Is she qualified? Is he experienced?
Perhaps this is doubly true with the author of Your Government Failed You because, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said recently on Meet the Press, “There seem to be two Richard Clarkes.” She did not mean it as a compliment.
There may be two Richard Clarkes. The first is the most experienced counter-terrorism expert in America today, having served in the very highest echelons of the Reagan, Clinton, and both Bush administrations. This is the erudite author of the 2004 bestseller Against All Enemies, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and other influential journals.
Then there is the other Richard Clarke, the demon of Fox News and conservative talk shows, who seems willing, maybe a tad too willing, to be the lightning rod on the national liberal barn. This is the man seemingly intent on getting more cable television face time than Geraldo Rivera. In the last month alone this reviewer has seen him on NBC Nightly News, Chris Mathews, Keith Olbermann, and, of all places, Jon Stewart’s pseudo-news show on Comedy Central. This is also the man who names his new book Your Government Failed You, thus insuring that a large percentage of the American reading public wouldn’t touch it with oven mitts and tongs.
This is a shame, because unlike Against All Enemies, which despite its benign title was an angry book, Your Government Failed You is a scholarly, measured, and balanced historical account of how and why our military and civilian forces shape foreign policy. Early in the book Clarke writes, “In my personal experience working in both Republican and Democratic administrations, neither party respects the U.S. military more or less than the other does. Both parties’ leaders have been aware of the strengths of the military and have honored those who wear the uniform.” Not exactly the words of a literary bomb-thrower.
Clarke’s respect for the military is obvious. He begins the book with a lengthy description of how Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Creighton Abrams and other military intellectuals, crestfallen and ashamed by the devastating losses in Vietnam, would create an entirely new military—smaller, more technologically savvy, and specialized for combat. Abrams and his protégé Colin Powell believed that by outsourcing such functions as transportation, supply, civil affairs, and intelligence to the National Guard, the Reserves, even private corporations, a new mission-driven and highly skilled military could succeed as never before. Their plan proved enormously successful in the first Gulf War of 1990-1991.
But more than a decade later, Clarke writes, insurgencies supplanted armies, at least in the Mideast, and the military was slow to embrace counterinsurgency methods that relied more on information collecting and clandestine operations than tanks and technology.
As the foremost American expert on counterintelligence, Clarke shines in explaining how American intelligence gathering works, how it differs from that of other countries, and how it can often go so spectacularly wrong. He explains why, for example, the system broke down between the FBI and CIA in the weeks just prior to 9/11, and what has been done to remedy the situation. We also learn of the State Department’s frustration over the continuing preoccupation of the CIA in spying on Russian spies and Russian spies spying on ours, a practice Clarke quotes a highly-placed Pentagon official as calling “a self-licking ice cream cone.”
Clarke devotes much of the last chapters of his book to “cyberspies” and the perils of outsourcing the most sophisticated computer programming to private industry, whose record on security is spotty. With ubiquitous hacking by foreign governments, industrial spies, and teenagers in their parents’ basements in Omaha, one is led to wonder if the future of secure intelligence will again be passing notes on bridges shrouded in mist, just as it was a century ago.
Despite the book’s title, Clarke doesn’t really believe in conspiracy-dripping big governments either failing or succeeding. The book is actually filled with individuals, both heroes and goats, who failed and succeeded in equal measure. He does have some surprisingly good things to say about career civil servants, whom some call bureaucrats, and some pretty harsh things to say about political appointees, especially those at the lower levels who used to be relatively impervious to the vagaries of presidential elections. He points out that the number of political appointees in the State Department, for example, has increased from 17 percent to 33 percent since 2001.
Clarke eventually gets around to the Iraq War, but it is not the primary focus of the book, or in Clarke’s estimation, our national interest. Even on this subject, he is surprisingly nonpartisan. “As much as I disagree with Cheney on Iraq policy and other issues,” Clarke writes, “I doubt that he bullied any analyst in the CIA.” This is a pass that Cheney can’t get from some members of his own party these days.
Clarke writes with enough self-deprecating humor and sense of storytelling to keep us turning the pages. Occasionally his enthusiasm gets the best of him, as when he describes Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling as “the pioneering tip of the iceberg,” and his “eight points of this” and “twelve points of that” can get a little preachy at times. But on balance Clarke shows he knows the difference between lecturing and telling a story, and he tells a very good, and often scary, one.
Richard A. Clarke is a national treasure—our most knowledgeable expert on national security and a gifted writer. But please Mr. Clarke, stop entitling your books with a blowtorch and stay the hell off Comedy Central.
Jack Shakely is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy at
the University of Southern California and author of the historical novel The Confederate War Bonnet.
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