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"Your government failed you . . . and I failed you."
Richard Clarke's dramatic statement to the grieving families during the
9/11 Commission hearings touched a raw nerve across America. Not only
had our government failed to prevent the 2001 terrorist attacks, but it
has proven itself, time and again, incapable of handling the majority
of our most crucial national security issues, from Iraq to Katrina and
beyond. This is not just a temporary failure of our current leadership
-- it is a systemic problem, the result of a pattern of incompetence
that must be understood, confronted, and prevented.
Clarke's first book, the number one best-seller Against All Enemies: Inside America's War
on Terror, explained how the United States had stumbled into a
struggle with violent Islamist extremists. Now, in Your Government Failed You, Clarke
looks at why these unconscionable failures have continued and how
America and the world can succeed against the terrorists. Yet Clarke
also goes far beyond terrorism, to examine the inexcusable chain of
recurring U.S. government disasters. Despite the lessons of Vietnam,
there is Iraq. A trail of intelligence failures litters the Washington
landscape. From Katrina to color codes and duct tape, "homeland
security" has been an oxymoron. Why does the superpower continue to
bobble national security?
Clarke minces no words in his examination of the breadth and depth of
the mediocrity, entropy, and collapse endemic in America's national
security programs. In order for the United States to stop its string of
strategic mistakes, we first need to understand why they happen.
Drawing on his thirty years in the White House, Pentagon, State
Department, and intelligence community, Clarke gives us a privileged,
if horrifying, inside look into the debacle of government policies,
discovering patterns in the failures and offering ways to stop the
cycle once and for all.
pub date: 2008-05-27 | hardcover | 9780061474620 |
