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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I didn't say that anyone was "obstructing his plan." The government is trying to do a lot of things at once, and people sometimes (e.g.) compete for scarce resources. And your hindsight about Congress "screaming for action" is completely fictive. When Clinton ordered the cruise missiles launched in an effort to take out OBL, he knew he'd take heat from the Republican Congress, which was outraged that he'd do something to distract from Monica Lewinsky.
Clarke says in his book that they could have done more.
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Compete yes. But the President sets the agenda, and if it was such a high priority, Clarke should have been able to compete more successfully. The problem is that it was not the highest priority to say the least.
Fictive? Go back and look at the WSJ editorial page in the mid-1990s (pre-Lewinsky). I'm not saying that the entire GOP congress was pushing, but there was a loud group that was. Incidentally, the timing of the bombing was very coincidental, wasn't it?
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To some extent, you are correct. In hindsight, it's easy to say that more should have been done. The fact remains that Clinton took the problem more seriously than Bush.
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Clinton may have taken it more seriously than Bush, but not by a lot or at least his actions didn't reflect it. You also have to remember that Bush was only in office for 9 months when 9/11 occured, so to the same extent it's not fair to judge by hindsight, it's also not fair to judge a guy who was on the job 8 years with one on the job for 9 months. And yes, I know, Burger et all met with Bush and stressed terrorism, but frankly, if I was Bush, I'm not sure it would have meant all that much to me.
