TONIGHT
E-mail a friendRichard Clarke
airdate June 5, 2008
Richard Clarke has advised four presidents—from Reagan to George W. Bush—on national security. An internationally recognized expert, he was the country's first counter-terrorism czar. After criticizing the Bush administration's 9/11 response, Clarke left federal service. He now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School, is an on-air ABC News consultant and chair of Good Harbor Consulting. He's also a best selling author, whose books include Against All Enemies, The Scorpion's Gate and Your Government Failed You.
Former counter-terrorism advisor explains how accountability and placing qualified individuals in government will fix many systematic problems. (3:00)
Full interview. (11:42)
Richard Clarke
Tavis: Richard Clarke has served as an adviser to four U.S. presidents, including his post as counterterrorism adviser under both Presidents Clinton and Bush. He's also a bestselling author whose latest book is called "Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters." He joins us tonight from Washington. Mr. Clarke, nice to have you back on the program, sir.
Richard Clarke: Tavis, it's great to be back with you.
Tavis: The first thing I thought when I saw this title, "Your Government Failed You," is that government is made up of people, and sometimes we talk about this thing called government, this body politic, as if it's some organism off over here somewhere, when it's really made up of people. So aren't we really saying that individuals in government who we elected and appointed failed us?
Clarke: Well, they certainly did, and they have before. But precisely because government is made up of fallible people, we have instituted systems that are supposed to prevent those failures, they're supposed to catch them and have checks and balances so they don't occur - standards and procedures and accountability and oversight, and all of that seems to have broken down somehow.
Tavis: So it's a dense text, but I guess the short way to get to it is what, specifically, our government failed us about or on.
Clarke: Well, when I said your government failed you to the 9/11 commission and to the victims' families, I thought I was talking about a pretty rare event in American history; a major government failure. But since 9/11, there have been all these other failures. There has been Iraq, there has been Katrina, there has been global warming.
There are lesser failures in Homeland Security and the continuing war on terrorism and in even cyber security. All of the major national security issues seem to produce bad results, despite the fact that we spend a trillion dollars, with a T, a trillion dollars a year on national security.
Tavis: So since government is made up of both Republicans and Democrats, who are you blaming here?
Clarke: Oh, I'm not blaming one party or the other; I think there is a systemic failure. And that's why I say no matter who we elect in November, Obama or McCain, we will continue to have failures unless that new president worries about the institutions and tries to find out what's the reason for this cycle of national security failures.
I've got some ideas about what the reasons are, but if we don't address those reasons, changing the people at the top will make things a little bit better or a little bit worse, but we'll still have the failures.
Tavis: I want to talk about two things - you must be psychic. I want to talk about two things, then: one, what some of those reasons are that you obviously detail in here in the text, and secondly, what advice you have for Obama, Clinton, whoever the next president - McCain - might be about where they ought to start to correct the problems that have led to these failures.
Clarke: Well, one thing they have to do is they have to recruit good people. And I think part of the problem has been in recent years that good people have been pushed out and replaced with a lot of unqualified political appointees. Homeland Security is a great example.
After 9/11, we build this Homeland Security Department to increase our security at the time of great threat. You'd think we'd want to throw away the political game book there and just get some real experts so that we could get something done, and yet Homeland Security ends up with a higher percentage of political appointees than any other department.
Tavis: The thing I'm still having trouble with really kind of circles back to my original question, which is that in the text, even, and even now in this conversation, I hear you saying without really saying it, although you get deeper in the book about it, that it's not a problem of failed leadership but it's systemic - it's about the infrastructure. You've made that point here now.
And I guess what I was trying to get at is that the infrastructure is still set up, operated by, and accountable to individuals. And the problem that I have, respectfully, with Washington is that whenever something goes wrong, nobody wants to blame individuals. Nobody wants to point the finger at who screwed this thing up.
Rather, we talk about this amorphous thing that our government failed us, and I don't know how we solve those systemic infrastructure problems if we don't get the right individuals in place. Does that make sense?
Clarke: It does, and part of it is making sure we have accountability. So when we have a major issue, whether it's terrorism or global warming or homeland security or Iraq, we put somebody in charge. And we give that person enough resources and enough authority so that they can reasonably get the job done.
And if for some reason they can't, if somebody gets in the way or some intervening variable that makes it impossible for them to get the job done, then they blow the whistle. Then they go off the tape to the president and say, "Boss, I can't get the job you gave me done because X or Y is in the way and I can't move it."
In the past, we had this concept of tsars. Admiral Rickover is the best example I talk about in the book - a guy who created the nuclear Navy from scratch, and he did it by being completely in charge. Now he was also completely accountable.
You have something like Katrina happen or Iraq, everybody does this - it's him, it's him, it's him, it's him. I couldn't do it, I wasn't in charge. Let's have some accountability by putting people in charge and telling them what we want done.
Tavis: The example you just gave a moment ago, and I have to turn my camera now to point out what I'm talking about here, but you did this and this and this and this and this - isn't that really, let's be honest, the way that Washington works? Isn't that what - we call it bipartisanship, but isn't it really refusing to play the blame game, as it were, so that nothing ever gets fixed, really?
Clarke: Nothing ever gets fixed, that's my point. And the only way we can get things fixed is to take a few important issues and say, "We're going to take this one off the table as a political issue and get the Republicans and Democrats to agree to it."
The other day, the three remaining presidential candidates issued a joint statement about Darfur and the genocide there and what we should do with the government of Sudan. There's an example of where - a rare example, but nonetheless an example - where we could take a national security issue, take it off the table as a political issue, because we all agree on what we want done there, and we're not going to fight each other, we're going to try to get the job done.
What if we could do that with several important national security issues and say we're not going to have them run by political appointees who got their job because they worked in the campaign or they gave money or they're somebody's cousin, but we're going to have it done by career experts who we're going to empower and then hold accountable?
Tavis: It's a novel concept, and I'm not altogether opposed to it. I guess I'm trying to figure out how that would actually work. Tell me more about how something like that would actually go forth, because Washington is run by people who have certain ideologies. You know this better than I do - that's why the Bush administration got in so much trouble, because they had their own ideology about how to reshape, how to remake the world that we live in in a geopolitical sort of way.
Clarke: And they took apart the controls, the checks and balances, the procedures that were in place to make sure there were alternate views and that there was analysis, and that there was a real systemic way of going about business. Tavis, you go to Germany or Japan or Canada or the United Kingdom and you go to, let's say, the defense ministry. They got five political appointees, probably, in the British defense ministry. We probably have 500 in the Pentagon.
You don't have to have these national security bureaucracies riddled with political appointees. You can have career experts, and you can get rid of them if they don't perform. This works in every other democracy in the world except here, where we're still operating with some sort of 19th century political spoils way of handling important issues. And as a result, as we have seen with all of these cases lately, and as you just said, nothing gets fixed, nothing gets done.
Tavis: The new president, come January of next year notwithstanding, is it your sense that the government has failed us so miserably, so badly that the damage done is irreparable?
Clarke: No, I don't think it's irreparable, but if the new president doesn't focus on it, I think it won't get fixed. And there's a tendency for a new president to look at his inbox and to work his top three or five agenda items, and none of them ever turn around and say, "Gee, let's get out the toolkit and repair the engine." But somebody's got to do that, and hopefully, I think the new president will have to do that because the engine right now is so badly damaged.
So many of the good people who run the government, the career people, have been driven out that I think the new president has to say, "How do I recruit," the way Jack Kennedy said to a whole generation of us "Come work in the government." How do I recruit good people, how do I keep them there, and how do I fix the rules so that only really dedicated experts are working on national security and not people who are there for political reasons.
Tavis: In terms of national security issues, as we sit here today I recognize that things on this front change by the day, but looking down the road a bit, as much as you can, what two or three things would you prefer to see at the top of that inbox? I'm talking specifically now about national security issues.
Clarke: Well, I consider global warming a national security issue. I think that's got to be right at the top. Getting out of Iraq, both because it's damaging us and it makes it impossible for us to really fight the war on terrorism as long as we're in Iraq. So fighting that war on terrorism is the third, going after al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is still alive and well; bin Laden's still alive and well.
And the fourth one is Iran, which may or may not be building a nuclear bomb; we're not sure, but it is definitely trying to destabilize our friends in the Middle East. So the plate's full. The question is while we're doing all the fires in the inbox, the things that have to get done by tomorrow, do we have time to stop and think about the longer-term problems that we're running, essentially, a broken government.
Tavis: And finally, Mr. Clarke, while we've spent most of this conversation - because you talk about a lot in the book about the role and the responsibility that the commander-in-chief has to wrestle with some of these issues that have led to the failure of our government, but it's not lost to me that there are a whole bunch of folk in Congress who are up for reelection as well, and they have something to say about this.
It's called "oversight." Tell me quickly the role you think that Congress plays or ought to play in fixing the problems of our government beyond the Oval Office.
Clarke: Well, Congress has the role of oversight and they almost never do it, especially in these national security committees - the Intelligence committee, the Defense committees, the Foreign Affairs committee. There are very, very few oversight committee hearings. They're not doing their job, and it's very hard for the American people to know when the government is screwing up if neither the Congress nor the media tell them.
Tavis: Richard Clarke has a new book out. It's called "Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters." Mr. Clarke, nice to have you on. Thanks for your insight, sir.
Clarke: Great to be back with you.
Back to June 5, 2008