"It looks like you're so clever"

The last few weeks have demonstrated two things:

1. Bill Clinton is obsessed with how he is viewed re Al Qaeda and terrorism in general.

2. He sees the second draft of history, and does not like what he sees.

The only thing that ever engages my curiousity in Clinton's behavior is Clinton's response to inquiries about his behavior. I didn't care about his campaign finance irregularities until he began using a definite article to describe drinking coffee--as in, foreigners with piles of cash attended "the coffee." I didn't care about Paula Jones until Clinton claimed that he and Ms. Jones were never "alone in the hotel," whch was something no one had ever claimed. (One would assume, first, that there were other guests in the hotel, plus a staff; and second, that this rhetorical construction was Clinton's rhetorical guy wire.) His sex life was his own business; if his wife could live with it, so could I, and considering who he was married to, I not only suspected he slept around, I rather hoped he did.

Did Clinton drop the ball on Al Qeada in the nineties? Probably. But then everyone did. I don't know that George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole would have behaved any differently. I remember being rather amused after the first World Trade Center bombing, at terrorists so stupid they would return the rental truck for a refund of the deposit. After Kobar Towers, after the Cole, I was reminded of Ronald Reagan's blunders in Beirut, and chalked them up to our status as the last great power. Every punk around the corner was lining up to take a shot from us; we were exhausted from seventy years of Depression, followed by World War, followed by Cold War. We wanted to enjoy, as George Will put it, our holiday from history, and collectively could absorb the blowing up of a warship without becoming too affected.
Sad, but true.

I always wonder: what would have been the response of a Clinton administration, or a Bush administration, had the 9/11 plots been understood in their entirety beforehand? The answer is, relatively speaking, not much. The plotters would have been rounded up. Someone would have gone Sipowicz on them in some Boston or New York police station, and gathered whatever information they could. And that's probably it. Had a President, on the basis of nineteen arrests, proposed invading a country and overthrowing its government, the reaction would have been stupified anger.

What I mean is, it took the reality of the towers falling to bring about an understanding of the conflict we face, as well as the political cache President Bush needed to invade Afghanistan. So all right. So President Clinton lived every day with the same restraints.

Still, then he has to go and answer Chris Wallace's questions like this:

I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this arises. I’m being asked this on the Fox network…[note — these ellipses are in the Thinkprogress transcript]. ABC just had a right wing conservative on the 'Path to 9/11' falsely claim that it was based on the 911 commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people….

I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him. The CIA was run by George Tenet who President Bush gave the medal of freedom to and said he did a good job.. The country never had a comprehensive anti terror operation until I came to office. If you can criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this, after the Cole I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full scale attack search for Bin Laden. But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan which we got after 9/11. The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that Bin Laden was responsible while I was there. They refused to certify. So that meant I would have had to send a few hundred special forces in helicopters and refuel at night. Even the 9/11 Commission didn’t do that. Now the 9/11 Commission was a political document too. All I’m asking is if anybody wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book…

At least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t….. {ellipses in the Thinkprogress transcript]. I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke… [ellipses in Thinkprogress transcript] So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me….

I worked hard to try and kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now I never criticized President Bush and I don’t think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that think Afghanistan is 1/7 as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and Al Qaeda with that sort of dismissive theme when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror. And you’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever…

"You've got that little smirk on your face." Brother.

From NRO's The Corner.