After the August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda attacks on America’s East African embassies, the “first foreign rescue team to arrive on the scene was from Israel,” recalled National Security Council (NSC) veteran Richard Clarke in his controversial 2004 memoir. In Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, this former high-ranking NSC official praised America’s alliance with Israel yet promoted a dead-end Palestinian peace process that has only endangered this strategic partner.
The emergency response to the embassy bombings provided Clarke with a poignant example of Israel’s value to America:
When my Israeli counterpart had heard about the attack, he had launched an aircraft with a heavy search-and-rescue team on a dedicated aircraft they kept loaded with equipment and on constant alert. The Israelis had not called us to ask; they knew we would be busy.
Clarke detailed how this American-Israeli relationship came of age in the 1980s:
Ronald Reagan’s administration was responding to the threat of the Soviet Union’s military involvement in the Middle East by bringing the United States closer militarily to Israel. Prior to this period, it was a given in the State Department that the United States could not expand military relations with Arab states and at the same time do so with Israel. U.S. military relations with Israel were minimal in the 1960s and 1970s. We had greatly expanded arms supplies after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, but our two militaries hardly knew each other. Looking at the threat the Soviet Union posed to the eastern Mediterranean, the Reagan administration sought to change that. The Administration proposed ‘Strategic Cooperation’ with Israel. It was just short of a military alliance. To operationalize the concept, in 1983 we created something called the Joint Politico-Military Group or JPMG, a U.S.-Israeli planning group. First as a staff member and later as the U.S. head of the JPMG, I sought to find roles for the Israeli military in joint operations with American forces in the event of a war with the Soviet Union.
Accordingly, by the end of the Reagan Administration “Marines were regularly staging landings in Israel, Air Force and Navy fighters were flying into Israel air bases,” Clarke noted. These developments contradicted the false assumption that closer ties with Israel would hinder America’s relationships with Arab nations. As he examined, growing American cooperation with Israel was one element of deepening American military involvement in the Middle East.
Forming an alliance with Israel “was the right thing to do militarily and morally,” Clarke observed, and this decision only came by Reagan bucking officialdom conventional wisdom concerning Israel. “Our stronger military relationship with Israel came about only by the Reagan White House imposing it on the Pentagon and State Department,” Clarke noted. Nonetheless, he worried that America’s “closer relationship with Tel Aviv did over time inflame some Arab radicals and give them propaganda to help recruit terrorists to their anti-American cause.”
Clarke’s predictable answer to this dilemma lay in an oft-sought Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement that would create a Palestinian state alongside Israel, a goal that preoccupied Bill Clinton in the final years of his presidency. His obsession ended with his hosting of the Camp David talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat in July 2000. Yet pursuing this goal diverted attention away from striking at Al Qaeda’s bases in Afghanistan, precisely a concern that had increasingly dominated Clarke.
As Clarke wrote:
Time was running out on the Clinton administration. There was going to be one last major national security initiative and it was going to be a final try to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. It really looked as if that long-sought goal were possible. The Israeli Prime Minister had agreed to major concessions. I would liked to have tried both, Camp David and blowing up the al Qaeda camps. Nonetheless, I understood. If we could achieve a Middle East peace much of the popular support for al Qaeda and much of the hatred for America would evaporate overnight. There would be another chance to go after the camps.
Arafat infamously rejected any negotiation over the two-state plan offered at Camp David. Instead, he rewarded Clinton and Barak for their efforts with a preplanned, murderous terror campaign against Israel. This Second Intifada exposed the fundamental futility of the 1993 Oslo Accords peace process that began during Clinton’s first year in the White House. Israel’s Arab neighbors namely throughout history have yet to show a willingness to abandon their jihad to destroy Israel.
The years following 2000 have also undermined Clark’s contention that with “Middle East peace much of the popular support for al Qaeda and much of the hatred for America would evaporate overnight.” These words expressed the commonplace linkage theory that solving conflicts with Israel will reduce anti-Western instability throughout the Muslim world. By contrast, all manner of turmoil in the last two decades has demonstrated that Muslims globally present numerous conflict potentials unrelated to Israel.
Despite these analytical failures, Clarke in 2004 wanted to double down on Palestinian peace pursuits. American leaders have been “paying scant time and attention to the Israeli-Palestinian problem,” he wrote, as if more rounds of shuttle diplomacy and conferences would have any positive result. “One can imagine Clinton trying one more time to force an Israeli-Palestinian settlement,” Clarke fantasized if Clinton were still president after 9/11.
Along with Clarke’s other writings on Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, his views on Israel, however interesting, are not without flaws. Moreover, his fellow Democrats are increasingly following his bad advice, ignoring United States assets in Israel while pressuring Israel to make more harmful concessions for the chimera of placating the Palestinians. Clarke throughout Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror portrayed himself as an outside-the-box thinker, but his thinking in 2004 and since has unfortunately often reflected flawed conventional wisdom.