US Politics: Much has been written about the explosive charge made by Richard A. Clarke in this book, and in testimony in Washington, that George Bush dropped the ball before the terrorist attacks on the US, writes Conor O'Clery.
His primary motivation in writing Against All Enemies is clearly to flay the president for ignoring his obsessive warnings about al-Qaeda and then making disastrous decisions after 9/11.
Clarke's opposition to the Iraq war has made him an unlikely icon of the left, but this powerful and secretive national security aide is no anti-war liberal. His searing indictment of the Bush administration only comes at the end of an account of a hawkish career in the conduct of the US's secret wars. In the 1970s and 1980s he urged harsh retaliation for attacks on Americans abroad, organised closer military ties between the US and Israel, and got Stinger missiles into Afghanistan (with the help of Richard Perle) to defeat the Russians. As counter-terrorism czar in the 1990s he regularly got involved in "extraordinary renditions", or snatches, of terrorist suspects from unsuspecting countries, and in the disappearance of inconvenient people, such as a top Egyptian mujahideen in Bosnia.
Bill Clinton and Al Gore were enthusiastic advocates of his tactics.
"Of course it is a violation of international law," Gore said in approving one snatch. "That's why it's a covert action."
Clarke claims that the US came close to war with Iran in the 1990s and conflict was avoided only after an unspecified "intelligence operation" helped convince Tehran to cease terrorist operations against US interests.
There is little reflection in the book, no retrospective analysis of the wisdom of arming Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, or of the bitter legacy of the CIA's subversion of democracy in Iran, or why the Americans were in Beirut in 1982. Terrorism happened, and it was Clarke's job to deal with it and, by his account, he was always right. One of the liveliest and most revealing chapters describes how the Bush administration reacted in the hours after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Clarke assumed the role of crisis manager, ordering Air Force One to fly Bush to a safe location and getting presidential authorisation to shoot down a hijacked passenger jet if necessary. The few operatives who stayed at the braced-for-attack White House e-mailed out a list of names so that rescue teams would know how many bodies to look for.
There were instances of terror, as when a fighter jet broke the sound barrier, causing an agent to cry out "holy Mary, mother of God", and near-farce as the vice-president's wife Lynn Cheney kept turning down the volume on a crucial communications line in the emergency room so she could hear CNN.
Clarke gives credit to Bush for being a "confident, determined, forceful" leader when he returned after the initial chaos. He told the president immediately that 9/11 was without doubt an al-Qaeda attack. Next day, in the Situation Room, Bush told him: "Go back over everything, everything . . . See if Saddam did this."
The Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext for invading Iraq and this, argues Clarke, made the US less secure and strengthened the radical Islamic terrorist movement. Clarke makes a strong argument that in the pre-9/11 era Clinton was tougher on terrorism than Bush, though he faults him for not carpet-bombing al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.
The big mistake of the Bush administration was not to take Clarke seriously, he writes. He concludes, ominously, that because of the unthinking reaction and ham-handed response to 9/11 "we will pay the price for a long time".
Conor O' Clery is North America Editor of The Irish Times
Against All Enemies. By Richard A. Clarke, Free Press, 304pp. £18.99