Review: Against all Enemies by Richard A. Clarke
I heard about Against all Enemies by Richard A. Clarke via Technorati’s BookTalk, which lists the books that the blogging community is currently reading. When it was introduced, _Against all Enemies_ was at the top, having already been sold out on Amazon and not even having arrived at Amazon.de. I thought it was a book I should read and so I ordered it once it came out. It’s an amazing book… following are a few more thoughts on it.
The book is an account of Richard A. Clarke and how he saw America’s war on terror from the inside, as the sub headline already gives away. Very importantly he starts by saying that this is his personal account, written by himself and there might be other views of the things that happened. But he can only recount the things that happened how he saw it and this needs to be remembered when you read the book. This is somebody that is very knowledgable of terrorism and the inner workings of the US government and secret service organisations, but at the same time he might have been following terrorism too harshly. This isn’t a one sided thing in which you either support his cause of work against terrorism or you don’t. There are a multitude of things a state needs to do at any time and some just believed other things to be more important. He was proven right that terrorism was very important, but with hindsight that is always easy.
You will read some weird things that happened and you will appreciate they background to why the US is stationed where it is stationed and why they supported which state and why it was seemingly the right thing to do at the time. His words are conculsive and I agree on the big picture of it. If you are able to step back and think about potential other viewpoints then this book will be an amazing source of learning!
He finishes the book with some ideas of how al Qaeda might be defeated and one little sentence springs to mind as having the most importance:
_To defeat that [al Qaeda] enemy and prevent it from achieving its objectives, we need to do mor ethan just arrest and kill people. We and our values needed to be more appealing to Muslims than al Qaeda is._ — Richard A. Clark
His other views are important too but I will leave those to the book for those interested. Take it as another side of the story, one that has not been told enough. There is not enough discussion about all of this and Clarke agrees it seems. He was just getting too weak to fight this war of words on his own. There was too little support in the higher ranks.
A sad picture of the US government is painted here and we will see where all this leads.