Besides half hearted threats and hand wringing, what was the response from the Clinton's after the USS Cole?
A number of the so-called "neo-conservatives" actually made public statements in the late 1990s and October of 2000 in which they called upon the Clinton administration to respond forcefully to the embassy bombings and attack on the Cole -- by toppling Saddam Hussein. There was no shred of evidence of any Iraqi involvement in any of these attacks, but the obsession of these neo-cons with a plan of "regime change" in Iraq was so utterly pathological that they didn't have a clue about how serious a threat radical Islam posed to the U.S.
It should come as no surprise that nothing dramatic occurred in the first eight months of 2001 . . . many of these morons ended up working in the Bush administration.