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In the Situation Room, the talk turned to next steps. "Okay," I began, "we all know this was al Qaeda. FBI and CIA will develop the case and see if I'm right. We want the truth, but, in the meantime, let's go with the assumption it's al Qaeda. What's next?" I asked the video conference.
"Look," Rich Armitage responded, "we told the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if this happened, it's their ass. No difference between the Taliban and al Qaeda now. They both go down."
-- Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies
Monk was perhaps too excited in getting a number of books on 9/11 and the War on Terror. He generally shies away from books that promise to be self-glorifying. However, when he read a book review that argued that the first chapter of Clarke's book is the greatest insider account of what was going on in Washington on 9/11, with Clarke having managed the crisis team, he splurged and got it if only for that chapter.
It seemed all the more fitting as a complement to Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, which takes us from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan all the way to September tenth, and it does work well together. One may not want to buy the book for only these thirty-three pages, but it is worth finding and reading. Monk is putting the book away, himself, having much else that he wants to get into without retreading the history.
I'll give a couple of more tidbits here. After speaking on TV that night, President Bush enters his first meeting with the crisis team:
'When, later in the discussion, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. "No," the President yelled in the narrow conference room, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."'
One wonders about this perception of what is international law. Although some people criticize the invasion of Afghanistan, there seemed to be more of an international consensus behind it.
This last quoted paragraph shows Clarke's befuddlement over the Administration's interest in Iraq the very next day after the attacks:
"I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the Administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002."
.
In the Situation Room, the talk turned to next steps. "Okay," I began, "we all know this was al Qaeda. FBI and CIA will develop the case and see if I'm right. We want the truth, but, in the meantime, let's go with the assumption it's al Qaeda. What's next?" I asked the video conference.
"Look," Rich Armitage responded, "we told the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if this happened, it's their ass. No difference between the Taliban and al Qaeda now. They both go down."
-- Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies
Monk was perhaps too excited in getting a number of books on 9/11 and the War on Terror. He generally shies away from books that promise to be self-glorifying. However, when he read a book review that argued that the first chapter of Clarke's book is the greatest insider account of what was going on in Washington on 9/11, with Clarke having managed the crisis team, he splurged and got it if only for that chapter.
It seemed all the more fitting as a complement to Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, which takes us from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan all the way to September tenth, and it does work well together. One may not want to buy the book for only these thirty-three pages, but it is worth finding and reading. Monk is putting the book away, himself, having much else that he wants to get into without retreading the history.
I'll give a couple of more tidbits here. After speaking on TV that night, President Bush enters his first meeting with the crisis team:
'When, later in the discussion, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. "No," the President yelled in the narrow conference room, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."'
One wonders about this perception of what is international law. Although some people criticize the invasion of Afghanistan, there seemed to be more of an international consensus behind it.
This last quoted paragraph shows Clarke's befuddlement over the Administration's interest in Iraq the very next day after the attacks:
"I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the Administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002."
.
