OJ's last point is a good one...Gregg Easterbrook has a recent post on his Blog where he makes the point that the very Democrats who are now saying Bush should have done more were apoplectic when Clinton some airstrikes back during the Lewinski scandal. He also points out that the Republicans who are now supporting action in Iraq also criticized Clinton's more aggressive actions as "wag the dog" stuff, designed to take attention from his problems at home.

My view is different than some people here. I would LIKE to congratulate Clarke on a job well done. I would LIKE to pat him on the back.

But he won't shut up. You ever meet people like that.

OJ:

Good point. But our failure goes much further back than Clinton.

It is a cardinal sin to negotiate with terrorists. But every time we took planes where the terrorists wanted to go, rather than the first available piece of pavement equipped with decidedly prejudiced and overwhelming armed force, we were negotiating with terrorists.

The former was our stance pre-9/11. The latter is our stance now. Had it been that way all along, 9/11 would never have happened.

Which, unfortunately, isn't to say the Islamists wouldn't have found something else just as nefarious.

Jeff:

To the contrary, one should always negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers--then not follow through on the deal.

Jeff's point is correct, but prior to 9/11 hijackers rewarded that kind of behavior by generally not killing people. 9/11 changed that, they were not looking for concessions from us, but in the words of Auric Goldfinger, "I want you to die!", they were out for our destruction, pure and simple.

Robert:

Paul Johnson in 'History of the Jews' makes a similar point regarding pre-Hitler European Jews. Over the preceeding centuries, European Jewry became accustomed to pogroms every generation or so when villages would be burned and property stolen, and some killings, after which things returned to 'normal.' This was the mindset of Polish Jews when herded into the Warsaw ghetto. Their ancestors had heard 'Kill All The Jews' before. But they never imagined that Hitler would actually do it.

Orrin's central point is right. Before 9/11, I too considered terrorism to be essentially a law-enforcement matter, with the occasional assist from spec-warriors. Absent 9/11, that's probably how I would have continued to see it.

Considering that among the things the left demonizes most in connection with Bush is the Patriot Act and John Ashcroft, the howls of indignation would have been unimaginable if the administration -- or even the Clinton Administration under Janet Reno -- had instituted the types of screening processes that would have been necessary to weed out the hijackers and the terrorist financial support network in the United States (yes, some Democrats would have given Clinton and Reno a pass on what they're lambasting Bush and Ashcroft for, but the whacked out left was already at odds with Clinton from the World Economic Summit in Seattle).

I concur with h-man: Based on James M. Lindsay's remarks, it appears that Clarke was more correct about terror, and what the US response should have been, than anyone else in the Clinton administration.
Even if he is a jerk.

Another point is that all these analyses assume that the hijackers just happened to luck into a plan that worked and if only we had adopted some rule or another that would have thwarted the hijackings as they occurred, we could have prevented them.

Nonsense.

The hijackers designed their plan knowing what our security procedures were. If the procedures had been different, the plan would have been different.

Clinton didn't drop the ball in 1998 he dropped in 1993 in Mogadishu and with WTC I.