U.S. security expert fictionalizes nuclear threat

By Richard Satran

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Dreaming up nightmares is what former
national security advisory Richard A. Clarke once did for the
U.S. government. Now he’s doing it for fiction readers.

Clarke ended a 30-year Washington career in 2003 with a
much-publicized critique of the Bush administration over its
failure to heed warnings about the danger of al Qaeda. His
tell-all nonfiction book on the subject became a bestseller.

In his new novel released this week, “The Scorpion’s Gate,”
Clarke writes about a world pushed to the brink of a nuclear
war as a corrupt U.S. Secretary of State tries to restore the
deposed Saudi royal family to power.

Clarke says this view of the future isn’t sheer fantasy,
but instead is a “reasonable extrapolation from where we are
today.”

“I thought another policy book was not going to get through
to as many people as a fast-paced thriller — a book you can
pick up at the airport and read on a four-hour flight,” Clarke
told Reuters in an interview.

The book has climbed onto the best seller lists in its
first week on bookstore shelves, and a Hollywood producer has
acquired rights to make a movie. Early reviewers have been
mostly favorable — though some say the book’s characters talk
too much like Washington policy experts.

Clarke seems less concerned about winning literary awards
than getting his message across that the United States is
heading for trouble. In that, he has succeeded, said a USA
Today reviewer, who called the book “a red-meat feast for Bush
doubters.”

VISION OF THE FUTURE?

There are no scenes in the book centered on a U.S.
president, real or fictional. But its storyline does involve a
Middle East thrown into permanent disarray by the Iraq war, and
an emerging China fighting with the U.S. over dwindling oil
supplies.

“What this book says to readers is ‘There are some
trendlines in place, and if things go the way they are going
this is the world we are going to live in,” Clarke said.

In the new world, Iraq has become a puppet state of an
ambitious Iran, now armed with nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia
has been renamed Islamyah, and oil-hungry China is giving the
radicals nuclear arms. The deposed Saudis, meanwhile, are
paying a U.S. secretary of state handsomely to get them back
into power.

Clarke’s story revolves around two intelligence agents —
one British and one American — trying to defuse a nuclear
confrontation by reaching out to Islamic dissidents who are
willing to help save the world.

The story, he says, is the kind of “visualization exercise
” that goes on all the time in policy circles as strategists
work out worst-case-scenarios and prepare for them. “We imagine
it now so that those terrible scenarios don’t take place five
years from now.”

The Bush administration never had patience for such
homework, he said, even though it might have helped head off
the September 11 attacks or meant a fast response to Hurricane
Katrina that killed more than 1,200 in the U.S. Gulf Coast.

In a Washington Post Book review, former senator Gary Hart
quips that “Graham Greene and John le Carre are under no threat
from Clarke.” But he does have “a flair for action fiction” and
his vast experience as a national security expert make him a
formidable prophet of gloom.

“Some of us have learned to listen when Richard A. Clarke
has something to say,” Hart said.

Reuters/VNU