The Weekly Standard has been gracious enough to retrieve from mothballs an an essay I wrote for TWS in November 1998. The occasion was to defend President Clinton’s cruise-missile strikes against Sudan after the embassy bombings, to complain that the Clinton administration was not doing enough to defend the retaliatory attack, and — far from asserting that Clinton was “too obsessed” with bin Laden – to argue the problem was that Clinton was not doing enough about Islamic terrorism.

In particular, I contended — two years before the Cole bombing and three years before 9/11 — that national security was gravely imperiled by treating a national security challenge as if it were a mere law enforcement problem.

It’s interesting — for me, at least — to look back at it all these years later. There is a recounting of what had happened between Somalia (1993) and the embassy bombings (1998). Again, long before there was a 9/11 Commission, but I think the history holds up pretty well … as, unfortunately, do the warnings.

As Dan McKivergan relates, among what I argued at the time was the following:

Does the administration actually grasp the nature of the threat we face? Following the August 20 retaliatory strikes, secretary of state Madeleine Albright and national security adviser Samuel Berger rejected the predictable “wag the dog” accusations with solemn admonitions that, in terrorism, the United States has suddenly been confronted with a “new war” — one we would now have to be prepared to fight, alone if necessary. This was exceedingly curious. There is nothing at all “new” about radical Islam’s terrorist war against the United States. It has been going on since the late 1980s. It has been openly declared since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, which killed six, injured over a thousand, and caused nearly $ 1 billion in damage. Its leaders, moreover, have been promising for more than five years that in pursuing this war, they would kill American civilians and bomb American military installations and embassies overseas….
Such an adversary will not be defeated by the techniques the president recommended at the U.N. — increased international cooperation in the prosecution and extradition of terrorists. These are necessary steps, but breathtakingly inadequate. A military threat calls for a military response….
In the main, international terrorism is a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue. There is a severe limit to the circumstances in which it is either possible or prudent to apprehend terrorists overseas only to swaddle them in the rights of American defendants — including educating them, through the extensive discovery our system mandates, as to what we know about them and the precious and regrettably scarce sources of that information. Terrorists, furthermore, see the world in gimlet-eyed simplicity. They are not swayed by our breathless pursuit of international conventions that are broken with impunity, weapons-inspection regimes that we lack the stomach to police, or “peace processes” that become hideous euphemisms for body counts. These convey weakness. What impresses them is the certainty that force will swiftly and surely be met with exponentially superior force. That alone is a meaningful deterrent.

For anyone interested, the essay, along with Dan’s post, is reprinted here at WorldwideStandard.com.