Centerfield

Typically, we're wasting so much time trying to assign blame.

"The Left is responsible for this?"
"The Right is to blame for that?"

Having a debate like this generates a lot of talk and it's a great way to sell books to your constituency. Ultimately though, it does nothing to make us more secure.

I haven't read Lowry's book (although, if I thought it would shut K-Lo up, I'd go to NRO and buy every copy!!) but I suspect the book is less about learing from mistakes that were made during the Clinton Administration, and more about how "Bill was too busy with interns in the Oval Office to care about what was going on."

On the other hand, we also hear a lot about Bush and Rumsfeld and how they, personally, have screwed up the war on terror. Mistakes are made. Memos go out asking how we can do things differently (which is great), and the left talks about how it's an "admission of failure."

How is either constructive?

Yeah, I think the memo itself was constructive. And I like Rumsfeld's unapologetic stance on it his press conference.

Asking those questions is something you have to do every day, regardless of how things are going. Assuming you take the task of protecting our country seriously.

So Lowry's the genius who figured out that 9/11 was Clinton's fault, after two years in which most of us conceded that we were all unprepared for it?

Sounds like a cheap, partisan shot to me.

If we're looking for a presidential scapegoat, here is my nominee: Jimmy Carter. This is the comment I posted on Dan Drezner's blog:

I ditto the notion that the roots of 9/11 are to be found in the history of the Carter Administration. I wrote a post about that some time ago

http://www.sff.net/people/rickheller/2002_12_01_bloggerarchive.html#85791275

in which I reviewed the late General Robert Huyser's book Mission to Teheran discussing his failed mission to organize a pro-American military goverment in 1979, which would have forestalled Khomenei's coup later that year.

This was the great tipping point that gave momentum to the Islamist movement, both Shiite and Sunni. It needn't have happened.

While I agree with Colin Powell's critic of the Clinton Admin's foreign policy of, " they kicked the can down the road" I hesitate to blame Clinton for 9/11. Certainly Bush did nothing to change our stance towards terroism.

It took a 9/11 to wake us all up.

I think that Clinton realized we would evetually have to fight a war against international terroism, but he felt, and probably rightly, that without some event like 9/11, we would not be able to mount and maintain a war against terrorism.

Like FDR before WWII, the US wanted little to do with the Euopean war until Pearl Harbor. FDR understood we would eventually have to fight and he did what he could to prepare the US but that effort was limited by the dstrong isolationist sentiments.

Lets forget blame and concentrate on winning. We cannot afford to lose this war or let the terrorist win any major battles.