Bill Clinton was disengagged from terror's real threat before he ever met Monica.
We all were. Well most of us were, and I plead guilty.
There may have been a few people in the world who understood what was required, but it seems to me very likely that anyone in the Oval Office would have pursued the terrorists according to SOP right up until 9/11/01.
The movie, "Tora, Tora, Tora" depicts the President as giving the order to let Japan attack first. When you are dealing with nations that take time to build up to war and then will attack military targets, you can build up to defense and take the moral high ground of waiting to be attacked.
Before 9/11/01 that was the way the U.S could afford to play the game. If those on the anti-terrorism task forces knew better the people of this country did not know better. And our process is still governed by politics which means support from the people. In that light many of the things that were done prior to 9/11/01 made some sense. We could hope someone else might have been able to move us to a war footing sooner, but there is no real reason to believe so.
What's damnable (I use that word in the truest sense) isn't that we really didn't know what we were dealing with before 9/11/01, it's that we don't seem to know now. If I got no other message from the movie last night it was that the rules have changed and we will not win unless we start playing by the changed rules. It was a support for the Patriot Act. It was a support for the international wiretaps. It was a support for the covert prisons and interrogations. It was a support for tracking terrorist funds and drying them up at the source.
It was a support, in short, for everything our Democratic leadership is trying to shut down. It was not so much an indictment of the explicable failures of the past, but of the inexplicable failures of the present.
And it was a reminder that it really does matter who we elect to lead us, both in Congress and the White House.
Shalom.