Richard Clarke has an excellent oped in the New York Times. In it, he says we are losing the war on terror because our actions, particularly in Iraq, alienate the moderate Muslims we need to enlist and empower in their own struggle against Islamist radicals.

One lesson is that even though we are the world's only remaining superpower — as we were before Sept. 11, 2001 — we are seriously threatened by an ideological war within Islam. It is a civil war in which a radical Islamist faction is striking out at the West and at moderate Muslims. Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam — not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West — is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.

I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war. But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.

What we have tried in the war of ideas has also fallen short. It is clear that United States government versions of MTV or CNN in Arabic will not put a dent in the popularity of the anti-American jihad. Nor will calls from Washington for democratization in the Arab world help if such calls originate from a leader who is trying to impose democracy on an Arab country at the point of an American bayonet. The Bush administration's much-vaunted Middle East democracy initiative, therefore, was dead on arrival.

Clarke also warns against the likely recommendations of the 9/11 commission for more structural reform of the intelligence and law enforcement community. And Clarke is the first person to convince me that it is better to focus on fixing and improving the CIA and FBI versus trying to create some new domestic intelligence agency to replace the FBI's counterterrorism function.

The second major lesson of the last month of controversy is that the organizations entrusted with law enforcement and intelligence in the United States had not fully accepted the gravity of the threat prior to 9/11. Because this is now so clear, there will be a tendency to overemphasize organizational fixes. The 9/11 commission and President Bush seem to be in a race to propose creating a "director of national intelligence," who would be given control over all American intelligence agencies. The commission may also recommend a domestic security intelligence service, probably modeled on Britain's MI-5.

While some structural changes are necessary, they are a small part of the solution. And there is a risk that concentrating on chain-of-authority diagrams of federal agencies will further divert our attention from more important parts of the agenda. This new director of national intelligence would be able to make only marginal changes to agency budgets and interactions. The more important task is improving the quality of the analysts, agents and managers at the lead foreign intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency.

In addition, no new domestic security intelligence service could leap full grown from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security. Indeed, creating another new organization while we are in a key phase in the war on terrorism would ignore the lesson that we should have learned from the creation of Homeland Security. Many observers, including some in the new department, now agree that the forced integration and reorganization of 22 agencies diverted attention from the missions of several agencies that were needed to go after the terrorists and to reduce our vulnerabilities at home.

We do not need another new agency right now. We do, however, need to create within the F.B.I. a strong organization that is vastly different from the federal police agency that was unable to notice the Al Qaeda presence in America before 9/11. For now, any American version of MI-5 must be a branch within the F.B.I. — one with a higher quality of analysts, agents and managers.

Rather than creating new organizations, we need to give the C.I.A. and F.B.I. makeovers. They cannot continue to be dominated by careerists who have carefully managed their promotions and ensured their retirement benefits by avoiding risk and innovation for decades. The agencies need regular infusions throughout their supervisory ranks of managers and thinkers from other, more creative organizational cultures.

Here, Clarke has offered some of the most cogent, constructive, realistic recommendations for how the US should best try to wage a long term counterterrorism effort, that is informed by decades of working in the bureaucracies that are part of the struggle. The recommendations aren't flashy, but when you read them you simply know that he is right that, for instance, creating a sparkling new domestic intelligence agency at this point will only distract from the counterterror effort, as creating the department of homeland security has almost certainly distracted its constituent agencies with the organizational turmoil of the merger rather than enhanced their counter-terror capabilities.

Most interesting for me in this piece however is Clarke's clean cut through the murk to articulate how the neocons have failed at what they consider their greatest strength: engaging in a war of ideas with the Islamic world [and moral relativists here at home]. Clarke recognizes that the neocons are engaging in a dialogue of the deaf, that there is no interlocutor on the other side, and the neocons are in some weird echo chamber of their own creation, believing they are advancing freedom and democracy on the strength of US military power; totally deaf to the reality that the US misadventure in Iraq has incited such enormous anti American hatred and violence, it has made it extremely difficult for our allies among moderate Muslims states and even Europe to believe what is the premise of neocon philosophy: that the world is made a safer place by the expansion and projection of American power.

That credo is seriously in doubt, not just among the US' enemies, but by our real friends. And who can blame them, after witnessing the slow-moving train wreck that is post-war Iraq?

Posted by Laura at April 25, 2004 06:20 AM