EDITOR’S NOTE: This editorial appears in the (forthcoming) May 3, 2004, issue of National Review.

Condi Rice had her turn before the 9/11 commission, which has increasingly sullied itself with partisan gotcha games. Rice stymied hectoring Democratic commissioners with a cool and persuasive performance. The central point of her testimony was that for decades the terrorists had been at war with the United States, although we hadn’t been at war with them. The idea that President Bush in August 2001 could single-handedly have shifted the country onto a war footing is absurd. This argument is especially rich coming from Democrats who barely support a proper war against terrorism even now, after the September 11 attacks.

Could Bush have done more prior to 9/11? Absolutely. But Rice convincingly argues that the administration was taking all reasonable steps, given the context of the time. It was building on Richard Clarke’s ideas for an offensive against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, widening the proposed policy to include aid to anti-Taliban forces besides the Northern Alliance and preparing a new approach to convince Pakistan to dump its support for the Taliban. When warnings of a potential terrorist attack mounted in the summer of 2001, almost entirely having to do with overseas targets, the administration repeatedly alerted the U.S. military, and the CIA undertook disruption operations worldwide.

Clarke has argued that if the administration had gone to “battle stations” that summer, convening a series of cabinet meetings, a sense of urgency might have been imparted to the bureaucracy and the 9/11 attacks somehow averted. Clarke’s model is the Clinton administration’s response to the terrorist threat around the time of the millennium. Back then, an alert Customs agent kept a terrorist from crossing the Canadian border in a car filled with explosives. Rice punctured Clarke’s case by pointing out that an after-action report said foiling this attempted infiltration had been a matter of luck and that U.S. Customs wasn’t even on alert at the time.

Bush critics have focused on an August 6 CIA briefing about bin Laden’s intent to attack within the United States. Rice at times has left the impression that this briefing was entirely historical. It was not. But it was largely historical, 14 out of its 17 sentences devoted to relating old information. What was fresher in the memo was alarming, but vague (not nearly specific enough to be actionable) and even false. The memo’s report that the FBI had 70 ongoing field investigations of suspected terrorist cells was wrong. The biggest scandal about the August 6 briefing is that the president requested an accounting of the terrorist threat against the United States and got a product so shoddy.

Indeed, the most important lesson from the 9/11 commission’s work so far is that U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement have been deficient for long time. As Attorney General John Ashcroft pointed out in his testimony, the downgrading of the FBI’s capabilities was partly a product of deliberate policy, as the Clinton administration put legal obstacles in the FBI’s way in response to overwrought civil-liberties concerns. The Patriot Act removed these and other obstacles to effective counterterrorism, and the hearings have demonstrated the absolute necessity of the new law–even Janet Reno endorsed it in her testimony. The deeper problem with intelligence and federal law enforcement has been a culture of caution, instilled by liberal critics over the course of decades and periodically reinforced by second-guessing congressional hearings.

We have yet to truly reform the CIA and the FBI, allowing them to be creative and aggressive enough to meet the terrorist threat. But recent weeks have shown we still have second-guessing down to a science, which would be reassuring if the war on terror could be waged in hindsight or Osama bin Laden defeated by recrimination.