‘Crisis’ in the Republic. The Unitary Executive, the Bush Doctrine and Adversarial Review

One of the more dramatic political spectacles of the early war on terror was provided by the president's anti-terrorism ‘czar’, Richard A. Clarke, who resigned from his post in March 2003, then wrote a flamboyant book explaining why (Figure 2.1). Clarke's Against All Enemies (2004) described how the White House had ignored intelligence warnings about al-Qaeda before 9/11 and had hijacked the attacks to wage a wholly unrelated war on Iraq, fooling the American people into believing that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was implicated in 9/11. Clarke argued that the conduct of the president and senior figures in his administration amounted to a usurpation and abuse of republican high office. Justifying his resignation, he spoke of ‘an obligation’ to write what he knew, and of a higher loyalty ‘to the citizens of the United States’, which ‘must take precedence over loyalty to any political machine’. In the concluding paragraphs of the coruscating preface to Against All Enemies, Clarke paid tribute to the ‘small group of extraordinary Americans [who] created the Constitution that governs this country’ and issued a challenge to his fellow citizens: ‘In this era of threat and change’, he wrote, ‘we must all renew our pledge to protect that Constitution’, not only against threats from ‘foreign enemies’, but also ‘against those who would use the terrorist threat to assault the liberties the Constitution enshrines’.