- Andrew Sullivan: The damage Clinton did
...The September 11 massacre resulted from a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the face and, if the errors are to be rectified, it is essential to acknowledge what went wrong. Two questions come to mind: how was it that the Osama Bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was responsible in the government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and national security? These questions have not been asked directly, for good reasons. There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of national crisis. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness that Tuesday is already slowing the capacity to bring Bin Laden to justice by constricting military and diplomatic options. And with a president just a few months in office, criticism need not extend to the young administration that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus. Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year. When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries...ministers responsible have resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled? The most plausible answer is that nobody has been fired because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing in America's security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not only had Bin Laden already attacked American embassies and warships, he had done so repeatedly and been completely frank about his war. He had even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Same guy, same building. ... The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively, was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: Warren Christopher, the clueless, stately former secretary of state; Anthony Lake, the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but, above all, former president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to military and security matters now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter. Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defence than any other president in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than in the second, but even when he began to pay attention he was constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks."It is hard to come up with a more damning description of negligence than that. 
Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after Bin Laden struck again at US embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly. He responded with a couple of missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which seriously impacted on Osama Bin Laden... If the security manager of a nuclear power plant presides over a massive external attack on it, then it's only right that he should be held responsible, in part, for what happened. More than 6,000 families are now living with the deadly consequences of the negligence of the government of the United States. There is no greater duty for such a government than the maintenance of national security, and the protection of its own citizens. When a senior Clinton official can say of his own leader that he "spent less concentrated attention on national defence than any other president in recent memory", and when this administration is followed by the most grievous breach of domestic security in American history, it is not unreasonable to demand some accounting... We thought for a long time that the Clinton years would be seen, in retrospect, as a mixed blessing. He was sleazy and unprincipled, we surmised, but he was also competent, he led an economic recovery, and he conducted a foreign policy of multilateral distinction. But the further we get away from the Clinton years, the more damning they seem. The narcissistic, feckless, escapist culture of an America absent without leave in the world was fomented from the top. The boom at the end of the decade turned out to include a dangerous bubble that the administration did little to prevent. The "peace-making" in the Middle East and Ireland merely intensified the conflicts. The sex and money scandals were not just debilitating in themselves - they meant that even the minimal attention that the Clinton presidency paid to strategic military and intelligence work was skimped on. We were warned. But we were coasting. And the main person primarily entrusted with correcting that delusion, with ensuring America's national security - the president - was part of the problem. Through the dust clouds of September 11, and during the difficult task ahead, one person hovers over the wreckage - and that is Bill Clinton. His legacy gets darker with each passing day. 
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