Clinton on Foxnews Sunday

[Immacolata]

Originally Posted by August

While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.

Would anyone have believed the seriousness of this untill the 9/11? Could anyone truly say we are at war and make the majority of people believe it? It is easy to say bureaucracy stopped it from happening. Sometimes people forget that bureaucracy is here to make sure things happen BY the book. It is really nasty to be at the receiving end of someone who dodges the books. You have no protection. After 9/11, everyone saw that the books might need some new text, however.

[August]

Originally Posted by Immacolata

Would anyone have believed the seriousness of this untill the 9/11? Could anyone truly say we are at war and make the majority of people believe it? It is easy to say bureaucracy stopped it from happening. Sometimes people forget that bureaucracy is here to make sure things happen BY the book. It is really nasty to be at the receiving end of someone who dodges the books. You have no protection. After 9/11, everyone saw that the books might need some new text, however.

We'll never know the answer to that question as his administration made every attempt to ignore and minimize the publics understanding of the true seriousness of the threat. Still the indicators, as listed in that article, were there and hard to ignore, especially to someone who gets daily security briefings.