Back in the days of the Roman Republic, Rome's fiercest enemy was Carthage. By the middle of the second century B.C.E., Cato the Elder began to insist that Carthage must be destroyed: "Carthago delenda est!"
In his riveting book, Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke describes how he borrowed Cato's phrase to label a plan for destroying al Qaeda during the latter years of the Clinton administration*.
He goes on to describe the attempts to seek out and destroy al Qaeda's training camps and kill Usama bin Laden and concludes:
I still to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afgans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him. [...] The Principals and the President did not want to open the Pandora's box that the Israelis had found after Munich, they did not want a broad assassination policy and hit list, but the President's intent was very clear: kill bin Laden. I believe that those who in the CIA who claim the authorizations were insufficient or unclear are throwing up that claim as an excuse to cover the fact that they were pathetically unable to accomplish the mission.
It's worth reading Clarke's book and considering his arguments very carefully. It's not the screed against the Bush administration that it's sometimes portrayed to be.
* Minor quibble. He erroneously dates the phrase's origin to 201 B.C.E. rather than the 150s.
Posted by jt at April 11, 2004 01:46 PM