The War Against America [Paperback]

Laurie Mylroie was an adviser to Bill Clinton at the time of the 1992 presidential election in the USA. It is a measure of her disillusionment with the style and the practice of his administration that this book amounts to a damning critique of both his approach to foreign policy and his excessively cosy relationship with the Justice Department. Mylroie's basic argument is simple enough: Iraq sponsored all of the acts of terrorism and the foiled conspiracies against targets in the United States during the Nineties. Furthermore, Iraq lay behind the attacks on American embassies in East Africa and the terrorist atrocities in Saudi Arabia. She condemns as wholly misleading the widely repeated assertion that the first World Trade Center attack marked a new sort of terrorism, in which a loose group of homicidal activists, with no state backing, collaborated to launch the attack. Mylroie does not merely argue her case very persuasively, but she raises questions about the ability of the USA to respond to new attacks. While she is not afraid to blame Clinton's cult of spin for many of the shortcomings in America's response, she also acknowledges that part of the blame lies in the fact that the FBI is not entitled to share details of a criminal investigation with the intelligence community of the CIA and the NSA. That restriction is intended to protect the rights of the individual, but has two negative effects. Firstly, an administration with a mind to turn a blind eye to state sponsorship of a terrorist outrage can effectively kick the question into touch by ensuring that the Justice Department gets to control the investigation, thereby excluding the intelligence specialists (Mylroie quotes some very scathing assessments of the FBI's own intelligence capabilities). Secondly, for a state wishing to organise an attack on American interests, it actually makes more sense, Mylroie shows, to undertake the atrocity on American soil. If the crime is committed abroad, the criminal investigation will be conducted by the local police (she cites the example of the Scottish police after the Lockerbie atrocity) and, assuming the findings are handed over to the American authorities, intelligence analysts have an equal right to see them. When the attack takes place on American soil, the intelligence analysts are excluded. This book shows how ambitious the terrorist attacks on the USA have been, supporting the author's contention that the sophisticated intelligence service of a terrorist state must have coordinated them. Had the first World Trade Center bombing achieved its aims, even the appalling effects of the 11th of September, 2001, would have been dwarfed in comparison; in addition to the destruction of the towers, the release of a huge cloud of hydrogen cyanide gas was planned. I suspect many people do not realise how close that attack came to achieving its dreadful aim. Mylroie's book was published before the second attack on the World Trade Center, but consider this: a man who is known to have helped to mastermind the first WTC attack went on to plan a further attack from the Philippines, which would have involved the detonation of bombs aboard a number of American airliners. We have an attack intended to destroy New York's greatest landmark. We have a plot to turn airliners into flying bombs. Mylroie convincingly pins both of these on Iraq.