Fareed Zakaria points out that the Pentagon didn’t see Al Qaeda as a serious threat before 9/11 because they were still focused on states:
In due course, some senior officials in the Clinton administration awakened to the threat: CIA Director George Tenet, national-security adviser Sandy Berger and Clinton himself. But they never proposed a full-fledged assault on it. Their one dramatic attack — bombing the Afghan terror camps and Sudanese factory in 1998 — proved unsuccessful and led to domestic criticism, and they did not think they could do something more ambitious. The Pentagon, which comes off poorly in the commission reports, was stubbornly unwilling to provide aggressive and creative options.
So why the blindness? For one thing, the Pentagon is notoriously slow to react to changing conditions — the “still fighting the last war” syndrome, but for another, the attack on the Sudanese aspirin factory and the lame Patriot attack on an Al Qaeda camp minutes after bin Laden had left the tent were soundly criticized by the Right as “Wag the Dog” responses to the Lewinsky deal. So they do deserve a lot of blame for making such a huge deal out of Clinton’s penis problems, and a little bit of blame for the failure to see 9/11 coming.
The Sudanese aspirin factory is particularly important, because it was a nexus of cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda – bin Laden was an investor in it, and there is documentation of meetings between aspirin factory officials and Saddam’s chem/bio weapons people. For some reason, the Right doesn’t want to talk about these connections, presumably because it makes them look bad for the “Wag the Dog” charges, and the Left doesn’t want to talk about them because they’re so caught up in the firewall rhetoric that can’t afford to admit the connections existed. The Right has a lot less to lose from this, so they should open up a bit, even if to do so might make Clinton look better in hindsight.
That being said, Clinton’s timing in these attacks was as bad as his taste in women, so the bulk of the blame for the public’s bad reaction rests on his greasy shoulders. And that being said, the blame for 9/11 doesn’t rest on any branch of the US government, it’s 99% on Al Qaeda itself, so let’s not lose perspective here, OK?
I would say Zakaria’s got it precisely backwards — that NOT focusing on states and their role in terror (but rather focusing on terrorism as a law enforcement problem after the fact) was and remains the Dem approach to terrorism, and that only after 9-11 and George Bush’s redefinition of our approach (we will make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbor them) did the conventional wisdom begin to change on how to fight terror. Even so, John Kerry still sees the issue primarily as a law-enforcement matter.
The Dems and the pre-9/11 Pentagon shared a common understanding of terrorism as a basically intractable problem, but it wasn’t front and center on Bush’s radar either – he was all about that missile shield mumbo-jumbo, a holdover from Reagan.
But Bush has made a lot more progress toward a proper understanding than his enemies since then, which is why I’m supporting his re-election.