Review: Against All Enemies

Richard Clarke wrote this book in 2004, but it wasn't published until 2006 (something about White House clearance or something). I don't remember when I got it, but in with the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, I finally made it a point to read it.

Clarke covers the U.S. experience with terrorism from the 1980s through to the Iraq War. He then discusses why the Iraq War was a terrible strategic error that, in fact, distracted from the real War on Terrorism, which was in Afghanistan.

In the final chapter, Clarke criticizes the George W. Bush administration for having misled the country regarding the connections between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network. While -- yes -- Iraq had not accounted for the weapons of mass destruction it reputed had, the allegation of ties to al Qaeda was a fabrication that not even British prime minister Tony Blair used as a casus belli.

Nevertheless, fully 70% of Americans (at the time of writing) believed Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, and therefore supported the war. Why did they believe that? Because President Bush said so.

Bush used the slogan, "Support the Troops" to win reelection in 2004, despite the signs that it was not going well. By 2006, it was even more apparent, and in the midterms eletions the Republican party was handed a serious drubbing.

It's been 20 years since the beginning of the Iraq War, but we've never really had a deliberate reconciliation with what we believed, what was true, and what responsibility we have for the mess we made in Iraq. In the name of the ~3,000 people who were killed on September 11, we killed tens of thousands more.

What makes it all the more tragic is the fact that it was completely extraneous to the war on terrorism -- a fact Clarke identified before the war had even started.