Kevin Drum reports, having finished Clarke's Against All Enemies. Some lines:

...but let's try to sort out what Clarke actually says and why he says it anyway, because I don't think it's entirely obvious just from the snippets we've seen on TV over the past week. The story is a little more complicated than it appears.

To begin with, the bulk of the book is a fairly straightforward description of terrorism during the 90s: what happened, how we responded, how we eventually put the al-Qaeda pieces together, and what kinds of institutional problems prevented a more effective response. It is largely concerned with Clarke's efforts to get official Washington to take terrorism seriously — he is scathing toward the FBI and the military, and only slightly less so toward the CIA — and there's not much question that during this period Clarke was fundamentally nonpartisan, mostly just a bulldog who was obsessed with terrorism and frequently upset that the rest of the world didn't share his obsession.

So what was it that seemingly turned him into a Democratic partisan? ...
Although Clarke says he was "beyond mad" at Clinton for failing to keep his zipper shut, he became flatly infuriated with the recklessness of his conservative opposition:

I was angrier, almost incredulous, that the bitterness of Clinton's enemies knew no bounds, that they intended to hurt not just Clinton but the country by turning the President's personal problem into a global, public circus for their own political ends. Now I feared that the timing of the President's interrogation about the scandal, August 17, would get in the way of our hitting the al Qaeda meeting.

....Our response to two deadly terroist attacks was an attempt to wipe out al Qaeda leadership, yet it quickly became grist for the right-wing talk radio mill and part of the Get Clinton campaign. That reaction made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Qaeda, such as my later attempts to persuade the Principals to forget about finding bin Laden and just bomb the training camps.

For a true believer like Clarke, the partisan posturing in response to what he thought was the most important problem facing our country must have convinced him that many Republicans simply didn't take national security seriously. And what he saw when Bush took office must have convinced him even further:

- Although neither administration ended up hitting back as hard as Clarke wanted, he makes it clear that at least the Clinton team considered it a high priority. The Bush team was more interested in missile defense and relations with China.

- Even though the Clinton and Bush policies ended up being largely the same prior to 9/11 — Condi Rice's denials notwithstanding — Clarke believes the Clinton team was better at execution. Several terrorist plots were foiled in December 1999 due to a heightened alert status approved by Clinton, and he thinks 9/11 could have been foiled too if the Bush team had adopted the same approach in the summer of 2001.

- Finally, there was Bush's post-9/11 response. Clarke believes that the Bush team failed to understand that al-Qaeda was something fundamentally new. "You give bin Laden too much credit," Paul Wolfowitz said in an April 2000 meeting. "He could not do all these things...without a state sponsor." As a result of this belief, after 9/11 the Bush team wanted to go after Iraq while Clarke wanted to go directly after al-Qaeda."

During the Clinton years the problem was one of turning a battleship, but he felt that at least everyone took it seriously and helped to push. Then in January 2001 he suddenly found himself working for an administration that didn't take terrorism seriously, didn't execute well even when they did acknowledge the problem, and then after 9/11 remained so stubbornly ignorant of al-Qaeda's aims that they played directly into its hands.

I won't have time to give a read myself, so please forward any thorough reviews you come across. I wouldn't mind seeing a few from Repubs that actually address what's in the book. This partisan mess like Frist's shameless display last week is old. Funy for Frist to throw out the perjury claim, and then admit he hasn't read transcripts from the Congressional hearings. Let's have arguments, not schoolyard name calling.