"Why do you want to be Clinton's "protector"?"
I'm not looking to be anyone's protector, least of all his. I'd much rather continue this conversation without you making snide retorts implying that I'm some kind of Clintonista...I've avoided attacking you personally, and I'd appreciate it if you do the same.
"Talking about what we think that President Bush should do now, if not only silly, but unproductive beyond measure."
I guess we're just going to have to agree to disagree. To me, it seems like discussing future options and possibilites and debating their merits (though my impression is we would be entirely in agreement) would be far more productive than sitting around pointing fingers.
"It also has less than nothing to do with the topic of this thread. "
Last time I checked, this thread was titled "The Path to 911 Live Thread"...not "Pin the Blame on Somebody Thread". This was my reaction to the film, which is entirely relevant to this thread. People have expressed varying degrees of agreement or disagreement with what I wrote, which you can check on yourself, but yours are the only posts that make personal attacks against me.
Clinton could and should have gotten bin Laden. That's a given. I'm not trying to refute it, because its fact. As Roberta Wohlstetter, quoted in the 9/11 Commission Report said of Pearl Harbor, "its much easier AFTER the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant. before...the event is obscure..."
I can't speak for FR, because I'm a fairly new member, but I can speak for the majority of America in that, before 9/11, we didn't take people like bin Laden seriously. We were wrong to do so, and people died because of it. It was easy to write off events such as the Cole bombing because they occured in such far away places. It is to easy to write off the events of thousands of miles away as distant and unimportant, and we did. 9/11, for me at least, changed that. I know the Financial District quite well, and when I saw bodies and rubble in the very spots I had walked not long before, it changed me like nothing before or since.
The moral of the story is, hindsight is always 20/20. You might disagree, but the far more pertinent discussion is not who we can blame the deaths of thousands on in the past, but what can and should be done to prevent thousands of similar deaths in the future.
Future options, vis-a-vis the WOT, is NOT what this mini series was about and for you to do so, would be a true waste of time. You haven't the knowledge that the president has, nor his power. Playing "LET'S PRETEND" is a child's game and not what FR is all about.
I doubt that you and I would agree on anything you would dream up, with you playing armchair general.
And now YOU are taking on the "voice" of most Americans, are you? The bombing of the USS COLE was no big deal, because it happened so far away? I guess that what happened in Somalia and in the blown up American embassies, and the first WTC bombings didn't engage you at that time, because it was all so unimportant...right? And old OSB was a nobody, even when Clinton decided to sort of, kind of BOMB his camp in Afghanistan....right, again?
It's only when something happened, right under your nose, you began to care? If those two planes had crashed through the SEARS TOWER, instead, would you have just shrugged it all off?
Look, "finger pointing", as you call it, is germane; Clinton either totally ignored just about every single event happening world wide, during his presidency, as he went off on trips and apologized for slavery, smoked cigars and beat on bongos, hobnobbed with celebrities, and diddled a fat intern with a cigar with Arafat cooling his heels waiting to see him in the Oval Office; not to mention working as hard as he could, to cover up what he did to Paula, Juanita, Monica, and a seemingly endless list of women. His ONLY "foreign policy" interests were in getting as much foreign money that he could and in lining the pockets of those he was "friends" with. ALL OF THAT MATTERS!
OTOH, what you think President Bush should do now, matters not one whit.