Supporting player in the spotlight

Richard CLARKE'S revealing book "Against All Enemies" makes clear that he is perhaps the single most improbable hero American liberals have ever revered. Working inside the U.S. government, Clarke repeatedly urged leaders to set aside or evade the ban on political assassinations overseas. He was a strong believer in the use of U.S. military power. He was sorry that President Reagan didn't respond with greater force to the attacks on Marines in Lebanon, that the first President Bush didn't strike Libya after the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, that President Clinton didn't send U.S. troops against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 1998. Abroad, Clarke worked hand-in-hand with Israeli defense officials. Inside Washington in the 1980s, he was a friend and bureaucratic ally of Richard Perle, the leading hawk in Reagan's Pentagon, whom Clarke (by his own description) found charming.

Clarke also campaigned for an easing of the restrictions on domestic intelligence gathering by the FBI -- rules that were put into place in the 1970s after revelations of serious abuses. When, near the end of Clarke's book, he gives a brief nod to the issue of civil liberties by (accurately) accusing George W. Bush's administration of eviscerating them, Clarke's proffered solution is a weak and bureaucratic one: Rather than imposing new limits on intelligence gathering, he suggests creating a "Civil Liberties and Security Board" to keep an eye on what the FBI is doing.

Some of his views might ordinarily be greeted with a dollop of skepticism were it not for the fact that Clarke was right, clearly and spectacularly so, about one big thing, the biggest of all: Al Qaeda and the threat its terrorism has posed to the United States. As Clinton's counter-terrorism leader, Clarke argued that the administration wasn't doing enough to combat the deadly sophistication of Osama bin Laden and his worldwide terrorist network; then, during the early months of the current Bush administration, Clarke famously warned that the existing efforts against terrorism were being given lower priority, even as Al Qaeda seemed to be preparing a major new attack on the United States.