It was in this atmosphere that the Clinton and early George W. Bush administrations developed their policies towards terrorism and al-Qaeda. From our post-9/11 vantage point, those policies now seem to overstress law enforcement in preference to a military response, to underestimate the terrorist threat, and to lack an adequate sense of urgency. But these errors cannot be blamed entirely on the government officials assigned to counter terrorism. They are exactly what you would expect in a cultural and political atmosphere in which neither the media nor the general public was interested in an interview with the leader of a government that was sheltering and assisting the terrorist group that had already bombed the World Trade Center and the USS Cole.
Indeed, in between his barbed criticisms of the Bush administration to the 9/11 committee hearings, Richard Clarke made two very candid and significant admissions: first, that the measures he himself proposed against al-Qaeda would not have prevented 9/11; and second, that he did not propose the harsher military measures that might have done so because they would not then have been politically acceptable. Seen in this light, the failure of both administrations in which Clarke was employed to prevent 9/11 was first and foremost a failure to alert American and world opinion to the seriousness of the terrorist threat and to prepare effective measures against it. Given that the Clinton administration was in power for eight years and the
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