Success Quote by Ferdinand Mount

The line is built like an indictment that pretends to be a footnote. By anchoring the claim to Richard Clarke, Mount borrows a witness with proximity to power and a reputation for bureaucratic seriousness. That sourcing move does double duty: it shields the author from accusations of partisan melodrama while smuggling in a devastating moral charge - that fixation, not mere error, shaped history.

The verb choice matters. “Obsessed” is psychological, even unstatesmanlike; it frames Bush’s Iraq focus as compulsion rather than strategy. Then comes the brutal causal chain: obsession leads to negligence, negligence leads to missed chances on Bin Laden. Mount isn’t just saying priorities were misaligned; he’s suggesting a kind of willful tunnel vision, where the machinery of intelligence is reduced to background noise.

“Despite repeated warnings” tightens the screw. It removes the alibi of surprise and replaces it with the specter of ignored experts - a familiar post-9/11 trauma for a public trained to believe intelligence failures are tragic accidents. Here, the failure is cast as a choice.

Context does the rest. Clarke became a central voice in the early 2000s debate over whether the administration pivoted too quickly from al-Qaeda to Iraq, a controversy braided into the larger question of how fear, ideology, and ambition can redirect national attention. Mount’s intent is less to litigate a single decision than to spotlight a governing temperament: the danger when presidential certainty outruns the evidence in the room.