Yesterday, we linked a story that Jason from Generation Why had picked up on in which Bill Clinton claimed he was more interested in bin Laden than the Bush Administration and that had he had six more months in office he would have personally taken al Qaeda out, solved the Social Security crisis, read to every single child in America, and unified physics with a new 8th dimensional string theory.

Today, Paul at Wizbang wonders whether the real reason Clinton failed to act against al Qaeda in any significant way was that he was too busy trying to cover up his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Personally, I'm not so convinced by the timing argument presented by Paul. That is to say, the State Department warned Clinton about the al Qaeda threat during the same months that Clinton was busy obstructing justice, but this is not evidence that one effort contradicted the other. Presidents, it should be remembered, are capable of doing more than one thing at a time--even if they aren't the superheroes that Bill Clinton wishes to be remembered as.

In hindsight, Clinton's failure to act against al Qaeda seemed like a cosmic dereliction of duty. Warnings about what al Qaeda might potentially do, though, only seem so important now because we know what al Qaeda eventually did do. As we try to reconstruct history, let us remember that for every warning that turns out to be true, there are dozens of warnings that turn out to be false alarms. Many documents now show that there were warnings that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor. What is often overlooked by those wishing to play the blame game--or worse, the conspiracy game--are the dozens of other reports which claimed the Phillipines would be Japan's likely target. It is only in hindsight that we realize which threat was greater.

So, I don't blame Bill Clinton or George Bush for 9/11 any more than I blame FDR for Pearl Harbor. All of them were forced to make decisions and set priorities without the clear guidance of hindsight.

Who is to blame for 9/11, then? The first answer, of course, is al Qaeda and radical Islam. But the second answer may be more troubling. We are responsible for 9/11, all of us, the American public. Bill Clinton was not the only one asleep at the wheel, unaware of the growing danger of the global violent jihad, we all were. America was a sleeping giant, awakened from the pleasant dreams of the 1990s only when our enemies reminded us that they had been at war with us for a decade by striking our home soil.

While we were busy fretting over how to spend the tax surpluses of the 1990s, or an economy that had 1% more unemployment in the '00s, al Qaeda was busy planning our demise. We were all asleep at the wheel, only to be awakened much too late.

Let us never never be caught sleeping again.

UPDATE: Another Rovian Conspiracy agrees.

UPDATE II: Yes, Clinton is lying about his superhuman abilities every bit as much as the lie that started the rumor about his package size. But just because he serially inflates his central role in history does not make him responsible for 9/11.

Posted by: Rusty at 01:28 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 553 words, total size 3 kb.