In the next section Clark takes on Bush's conduct of what he calls "the real war" on terror. The Administration, he acknowledges, has had considerable success in eliminating Al Qaeda's commanders, disrupting its networks and going after its financing. On the other hand, it has made some serious mistakes, and its approach has been too narrow to constitute an effective counterterrorism strategy. In Afghanistan, he writes, the Administration adopted much the same approach as it did in Iraq, and with comparable results. Its campaign to take Kabul and oust the Taliban was brilliantly conceived and executed, but the aim should have been not just to unseat the regime but to deliver a crippling blow to Al Qaeda, and the opportunity was missed. At the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001 and in Operation Anaconda the next spring, US forces and their Afghan allies failed to fix and destroy the massed Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. In the wake of the initial conflict, the United States simply did not have enough troops on the ground, and the Afghan tribes allowed Osama bin Laden and his allies to slip away. The Administration then failed to commit the resources necessary to stabilize the country and refused to permit its NATO allies to help out, except in Kabul. As a result, Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants were able to use the territory on either side of the Pakistani border to hide, to recruit and to mount a guerrilla war. The Administration was, of course, disinclined toward nation-building, but beyond that its focus even then was on Iraq, on an agenda much older than 9/11, and on a war that would "enlarge the problem [of terrorism] rather than to focus on its essence."

In Clark's view, another of the Administration's mistakes in "the real war" was to rely on a "floating coalition" of the willing rather than to go to the UN and to NATO to develop multilateral approaches. With a "floating coalition" the US government has had to wrestle with a hundred bilateral relationships, and as difficult as this is at the top, it is even more difficult at the bottom, where most of the work gets done, because even in Europe countries have very disparate antiterrorism laws. Yet another mistake the Administration has made, as he sees it, is to focus on terrorists and their financing rather than look to the roots of recruitment in repressive policies, lack of development and the spread of fundamentalist madrassas in countries like Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia--all American allies. Further, he writes, the Administration has not gone about curbing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction effectively: It has not increased funding for securing the "loose nukes" in Russia, and until just recently it had done nothing about North Korea. In addition, Clark complains that homeland security has not been well managed: The Ashcroft approach has raised critical questions about civil liberties, and the Office of Homeland Security has failed to address key issues. At the very least, he says, the Administration should by now have come up with an agreed list of the facilities in the public and private sectors that require protection and an agreement on what the standards of protection should be. Iraq, in his view, has distracted the Administration's attention from all these things--and must for some time to come. In his opinion, a withdrawal that leaves Iraq in chaos, allows the return of the Baathist regime or permits the emergence of a radical Islamist state would do great damage to American security. He believes the United States should help the Iraqis form a representative government with political and economic freedoms--though how Washington is going to do this, he does not explain.

In his final chapter, Clark attacks the Administration's conception of American power and substitutes his own. Last April, he tells us, there was talk in Washington of Iraq as the first stepping stone to a new American empire. As the US armed forces marched on Baghdad, the perception was that the US military had achieved such a degree of superiority over all its rivals that Bush might fulfill his vision of liberating Iraq and transforming the whole of the Middle East under a Pax Americana. But the truth was that the US Army, the only force available, was not suited to this quasi-imperial vision: It was built for warfighting; it lacked staying power abroad and it lacked nation-building skills. Further, the American public had little taste for empire, and the international community had turned against the war. As it is, Clark writes, the Army has become dangerously overstretched, and US foreign policy dangerously dependent upon it. Clark sees the aggressive unilateralism of the Bush Administration as having roots that go back to the reaction to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s

and to the withdrawal from Vietnam and the other foreign policy reverses of the 1970s. After 9/11 Bush tapped into this frustration, reinforced, as it was, with real fear and determination.

Perhaps this should not have surprised us. "Transforming frustration at home into action abroad has emerged as a pattern in democracies under stress," Clark observes. "It...happened in ancient Rome, in the Netherlands and in Britain. And like most distractions, it provided false reassurance and was followed by damaging consequences." In Clark's view, American power resides to a large degree in the "virtual empire" the United States constructed after World War II: that is, among other things, its network of economic and security arrangements, the leverage it had in international institutions and treaty regimes, plus the shared values and reservoir of trust, or "soft power," that permitted past Presidents to lead by persuasion. Clark's forceful book warns that the Bush Administration is undermining this virtual empire and at the same time imperiling the "hard power" Bush counts upon, the power of America's economy and armed forces.

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