Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters

Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters | Richard A. Clarke | The Failure Of The War On Terror

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Your Government Fa...

	Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters Richard A. Clarke Ecco, 2008 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Lot to Think About!

America's government spends $1 trillion/year on national security, yet fails to provide security for its citizens. Clarke's latest book reviews several key areas and identifies both problems and potential improvements.

The Iraq War is the first topic reviewed. Clarke believes that the war was a major mistake, is not likely to achieve its purpose, and represents a failure in leadership. Examples of the latter include having insufficient troops, a lack of direction after taking Baghdad, poorly equipped and protected forces, loose control of prisoners, and poor treatment of our wounded after arriving back in the U.S. Clarke believes U.S. generals failed to stand up to poor decision-making by civilians, though also contends that top generals were chose for their compliability and admits that speaking out was a career-limiting move.

The end of the Cold War came as a surprise to American leadership, and is widely viewed as a devastating indictment of U.S. intelligence. Other failures include the CIA telling Truman in 1950 that China would not invade Korea to fight U.S. forces (that assessment was made after advance Chinese units had already entered North Korea), the CIA asserting that Iraq would not invade Kuwait (did so within hours of that forecast), concluding that Iraq did not have significant nuclear weapons development prior to Gulf War I, stating that Russia had not violated the Biological Weapons Convention (later was proved, and they admitted otherwise), mislocating the location of Russian nuclear warheads in East Germany, concluding that Iraq had WMD prior to Gulf War II and was also training al Qaeda, downplaying the likelihood of North Korea invading the South, India's developing nuclear weapons, failing to detect both the Tet Offensive and the fall of the Shah, etc. Hardly the expected performance for sixteen agencies with tens of thousands and $50 billion/year believed employed in intelligence activities.

Clarke is particularly upset at our failure to pursue Khalid al-Midhar (one of the 9/11 crew) in the U.S. even though he had been linked to the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in E. Africa, followed to Malaysia to a terrorist meeting in 1999 (secret photographing of his passport at the time showed he had a visa for U.S. travel, even though he had been identified as al Qaeda both by U.S. and Saudi Arabian sources, and entered the U.S. twice after that and lived in California prior to 9/11. A CIA Inspector General investigation post 9/11 concluded that 60 agents knew of al-Midhar's presence in the U.S., along with an associate.

The Afghanistan campaign is a long way from success, also due to inadequate force commitment, compounded by Frank's failure to send U.S. Rangers to cut off bin Laden's escape into Pakistan and others failing to provide enough economic aid. Clarke recommends we stop the heroin growing in Afghanistan (funds the Taliban) by paying farmers to plant something else.

As for Homeland Security, Clarke states that it presided over the most obvious domestic failure of the national government in generations, and is now laced with political hacks and private contractors. Unresolved problems to-date include fake IDs, failure to screen airplane cargo, little security effort involving trains and ships, illegal immigration, and non-functional software. Meanwhile, we have damaged our credibility and trust through torture, hyping arrests and plots, and wiretaps.

Worse yet are the related problems of oil funding terrorists and adding to global warming. Little has been done, despite the seriousness of both.

"Your Government Failed You" ends the topics examined with cybersecurity. We have problems with outsiders getting inside vital databases, overloading systems to render them inoperative, etc. Progress has been made, but it needs to become a higher priority.

Clarke's overall recommendations include reducing the size of government, and ending the privatization of vital functions, staffing them with political hacks, and rotating individuals in/out of these vital security functions.

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The Failure Of The War On Terror

With "Your Government Has Failed You", Mr. Clarke has written his fourth book on national security issues. His first bestseller was "Against All Enemies" (2004) was a history of his years as a national security expert for the White House, followed by two novels with terrorism as the plot : "The Scorpion's Gate" (2005) and "Breakpoint" (2007). As his new title indicates, the intelligence system is not working. He is highly critical of the Bush Adminsistration for their handling of the the Iraq and Afghanistan. He critiques the past 8 years of mistakes and is clearly worried about cyberterrorism on the Internet. His writing style is informative but he is not a natural writer. But Mr. Clarke is quite clear that the current system is a failure and a new one must be devised.

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Very Useful

This is much more than your typical critique of the administration. It is more of a future reference guide to how you can better inform yourself, and potentially, provided enough people read it, stave off a future disaster. With enough people clued in on the fundamentals, which is what this tries to achieve, it becomes less likely that an administration can abuse/subvert the intelligence of the people - and the body-politic.

I am about twenty pages to finish and I can tell you that this book is highly (and I mean highly) informative, as well as eloquently written and easy to digest.

Check it out.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6

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