From: Off With Their Heads - Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists In American Politics, Media, Business
 

by Dick Morris

As King Louis XV lay dying, he ruminated about the state of the pre-revolutionary French kingdom his son would soon inherit. Every-where he looked, he saw peril-the anger of the peasants, the arrogance of the nobility, the unfairness of the tax system. Sadly, he reflected that the young man who would become Louis XVI faced tough times. Old King Louis may not have known that his son and his daughter-in-law, Marie Antoinette, would lose their heads to the guillotine, but he must have had some sense of looming catastrophe. "Après moi, le deluge," he said. After me, the disaster.

As Bill Clinton left office in January 2001, America was outraged by his final insult to the integrity of his office-the pardons he granted to the rich, corrupt, and underserving. But only months later we learned of his final, horrific insult to us-that he had bequeathed to George W. Bush three ticking time bombs that would shortly explode: al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea.

President Calvin Coolidge's name was forever blackened after the apparently prosperous economy he left his successor, Herbert Hoover, imploded in a stock market crash seven months later. If history is just, President Bill Clinton's will likewise be blamed for leaving George W. Bush a nation unaware of, and unprotected from, the deadly peril that hit seven months later.

How much did he know? Everything he needed to. Al Qaeda was no unknown force to Bill Clinton: The terrorist group had struck the United States repeatedly on his watch, bombing the World Trade Center, the U.S.S. Cole, two U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and our embassies in Africa. Iraq had kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors, and it was diverting most of the $2 billion per year it was getting in oil money to buy and develop arms. And American intelligence had found that North Korea was secretly building nuclear weapons in vast, under-ground caverns, violating a commitment it made to Clinton in 1994.

Clinton knew where all three time bombs lay. His national security people even briefed Bush's incoming administration on the dangers of al Qaeda as they left office. But Clinton had done little to catch al Qaeda; he'd done nothing to rein in Iraq; and he had actively covered for North Korea as it violated its treaty commitments.

As he left the White House, he could well have said: Après moi, le deluge.

To understand how to deal with the enemies we now face, we must look hard at the Clinton administration's failures to face them down during his eight years at the helm. This inquiry is not an exercise in partisan recrimination. Nor is it merely an opening salvo in the historical debate about Clinton's role in fighting terror. Rather, it represents an urgent attempt to pin down how we got into trouble, to help us in get-ting out of it. We need to grasp the causes of our current predicaments before we can grapple with the solutions.

But one thing we do know: For years, Bill Clinton swept these three problems under the White House rug as they grew more dangerous and more immediate. And so, lest he reach too early for the role of Democratic spokesman, I call upon us all to look at his record on terrorism and join me in calling: OFF WITH HIS HEAD!

Back in 1996, in one of my last days in the Clinton White House, the president and I discussed how history would view him.

"I think your place in history will rest on three big things," I said. The president grunted, a cue to proceed. "First, I think you have to make welfare reform work. I think you have to implement the balanced budget plans you've laid out. And finally, I think you have to break the back of international terrorism, by economic and military action against the terrorist states."

President Clinton was in a philosophical mood as we chatted by phone that Sunday morning, August 4, 1996. He had just signed the welfare reform bill; now, poised for a big reelection victory in the fall, he wanted to talk about presidents, history, and his own administration. We discussed each of the forty men who had held the office before him, dividing the eighteen we liked the best into three tiers. That left twenty-two out in the cold.

"Where do I fit in?" he asked.
"Right now, to be honest, I think you're borderline third tier," I said, choosing my words carefully. "It's too early to rank you yet, but you're right on the cusp of making third tier."
"I think that's about right," he replied, to my relief. Clinton never liked sycophancy. Unless you criticized him as harshly as he usually did himself, he didn't take you seriously. "What do you think I need to do to become first tier?" he asked.
"You can't be first tier"-I broke the bad news gently-"unless unanticipated historical forces put you there."
"Like a war," he agreed. "Okay, second tier?"
I replied by reciting my list-welfare reform, balancing the budget, and fighting terrorism. "You had hoped to do it [break terrorism] with the peace process, but [Israeli Prime Minister Shimon] Peres's defeat closed that door. Now you have to smash it militarily, and through sanctions."

Clinton's welfare reform legislation has proven more successful than even its most ardent supporters had dreamed. Reducing welfare rolls by more than half, it has simultaneously led to an almost one-third reduction in poverty. He not only balanced the budget but generated huge surpluses. Even after he left office, the United States was well on its way to paying off the national debt when the double whammy of the 9/11 attacks and the usual Bush family economic slump sent us back into red ink. But once the economy regains its footing and the terrorism crisis passes, the sound fiscal course on which Clinton helped to put the nation will likely continue where it left off in 2001.

But on the war on terror, Clinton was an utter and total failure. His record of inaction is bad enough, but his inability to grasp the dimensions of the issue, as I witnessed it in our conversations, was worse. In our time this may have become a trite phrase, but there's simply no other way to put it: He just didn't get it.

Clinton knew every statistic, argument, and nuance of the issues he had made his own-welfare reform, deficit reduction, student performance, Head Start availability, crime, export promotion, and so on. But on terrorism, during his first term-the period I witnessed firsthand-he knew little and cared less.

All our terrorist problems were born during the Clinton years.

It was during his eight years in office that al Qaeda began its campaign of bombing and destruction aimed at the United States. It was then that the terrorist group orchestrated its first attack on the World Trade Center; hatched a plan to destroy New York's bridges and tunnels and the U.N. building; conceived an effort to destroy eleven U.S. passenger jetliners; twice bombed U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, killing nine-teen Americans; bombed American embassies in Africa; and attacked the U.S.S. Cole. Bill Clinton and his advisers were alerted to the group's power and intentions by these attacks. But they did nothing to stop al Qaeda from building up its resources for the big blow on 9/11.

Iraq was a subjugated nation when Clinton took office. Recently defeated in the Gulf War, its military infrastructure was largely destroyed. But under Clinton's intermittent and easily distracted gaze, Saddam Hussein took the opportunity to rebuild his military, expel U.N. arms inspectors, and open a spigot to get the money he needed to rearm under the so-called "oil for food" program. Moreover, on Clinton's watch the Iraqi dictator was able to rekindle his efforts to build nuclear weapons and further develop other arms of mass destruction.

North Korea first signaled its interest in developing nuclear weapons in 1994, when the issue was whether or not it would permit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor the disposition of spent nuclear fuel rods from its electric plant at Yongbyon, North Korea. The international crisis that followed reportedly led even President Clinton to contemplate a preemptive strike to destroy the fuel rods before they could be turned into fission-able material for nuclear bombs.

To defuse the crisis, former President Jimmy Carter traveled to Pyongyang to meet with North Korean leaders and see if a compromise could be reached. The agreement Clinton ultimately negotiated required North Korea to refrain from using the spent fuel rods to produce bomb-grade material and obliged them to accept IAEA inspection of the site. In return, the United States, Japan, and South Korea agreed to join in financing nonnuclear power plants in North Korea and to ship fuel and food to that beleaguered nation.

But Clinton was so eager to declare victory that he failed to monitor the enforcement of the deal as he should have. Americans were shocked in October 2002 when North Korea admitted it hadn't kept its end of the bargain-and was manufacturing fissionable material at a secret underground location.

All three critical situations America faces today-al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea-were either incubated or exacerbated on Bill Clinton's watch.

As I first became aware of this situation, I believed Bill Clinton was guilty of negligence and oversight. As I read the evidence, however, the picture darkened significantly. Clinton's attitude probably started as neglect of global terrorism-a field alien to the Arkansas governor's experience and worldview. But as his administration evolved and entered its second term, its failure to deal with these three looming threats began to seem more and more conscious, even deliberate.

Sapped by the effort to resist impeachment, focused on burnishing his legacy through his phantom deal with North Korea, anxious to avoid the political risk of major military action on the ground against al Qaeda, and eager to avoid stirring up things in Iraq, Bill Clinton deliberately postponed dealing with this trio of threats so he could leave office under a seemingly sunny sky.

That Sunday in August 1996, as we chatted by phone, Clinton mused that he needed to win a war if he were ever to join the first tier of presidents. He seemed to lament that none was available. But there was: the war on terror. He just chose not to fight it.

Should he have seen the threat of terrorism coming? From the very start of his administration, he had a series of clues about how serious the terrorist threat would become-starting when a bomb exploded in the World Trade Center in New York City.

The World Trade Center Bombing: First Shot Across the Bow

President Bill Clinton's uneasy history with terrorism began thirty-six days after he swore to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." On February 26, 1993, a terrorist bomb exploded in the B-2 parking garage under One World Trade Center. The blast was triggered by twelve hundred pounds of urea nitrate, found in fertilizer, and three tanks of compressed hydrogen. This attack, the first foreign terrorist bombing on U.S. soil in modern times, ripped a five-floor hole in the building, instantly killing six people and injuring a thousand others.

In later years, in subsequent attacks, we became accustomed to seeing President Clinton at the site of such tragedies, seemingly struggling to control his emotions, biting his lower lip and fighting back tears. But New Yorkers were spared that piece of theater as they tried to cope with the impact of the bombing. The president never visited the site of the attack; he did not attend any of the funerals of its victims. What he did was go about his public routine.

The day after the attack, Clinton used his regularly scheduled weekly national radio address to console New Yorkers. Promising "the full measure of federal law-enforcement resources" in apprehending those responsible for the bombing, Clinton vowed that "working together, we'll find out who was involved and why this happened. Americans should know we'll do everything in our power to keep them safe in their streets, their offices, and their homes."

Touring New Jersey four days after the blast, Clinton did not detour from his preplanned schedule in order to visit the World Trade Center site across the Hudson River. The New York Times reported that "although Clinton spent much of the day in northern New Jersey, he did not visit the site of Friday's bombing. Such a visit had apparently been discussed among White House aides, but officials in New York urged them to avoid it." An anonymous "senior administration official" told the Boston Globe that "Clinton had a full schedule in New Jersey, with no opening for a visit to the site in Manhattan."

Though he said he was "heartbroken" for the families of those killed in the blast, while in New Jersey Clinton assured citizens that "we've been very blessed in this country to have been free of the kind of terrorist activity that has gripped other countries. But I think it's important that we not overreact to it." He called on New Yorkers "to keep your courage up and go about your lives."

The Globe noted that "while security was noticeably tight during Clinton's visit to New Brunswick and Piscataway, he did leave his limousine at one point to ride from the airport in Newark with some children going to a learning center." First things first.

Why didn't Clinton visit the site? The emphasis in his public statements and in the demeanor of New York officials in the aftermath of the attack was to avoid an "overreaction." Worried about public panic, and perhaps concerned that a presidential visit would get in the way of rescue and investigative efforts, New York officials told Clinton to stay away.

Okay, but what about afterward? President Bush let the smoke clear at Ground Zero for a few days after 9/11, but less than a week went by before he went and memorably addressed the rescue workers through a bullhorn, rallying them and reinvigorating America's sagging spirits. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, never visited the World Trade Center in the aftermath of the 1993 bombing.

He didn't go because he chose to treat the attack as an isolated criminal act, devoid of serious foreign policy or military implications. The fact that this was the first foreign terrorist attack on American soil seems to have set off no alarm bells at the young Clinton White House. The president treated it as a crime rather than as a foreign policy emergency. He defined terrorism as a law enforcement problem, not as a matter of national security. To Bill Clinton, it was not unlike any other homicide.

Commenting on the former president's approach to fighting terror, Bill Gertz, in his best-selling book Breakdown, underscores how the administration saw terrorism in the context of law enforcement: "The Administration's primary goal here [in response to terrorism], as always was to identify terrorists, capture them, and return them for prosecution in a court of law. It was a reactive strategy that did nothing to deter attacks."

Clinton wasn't the first to make this mistake. In his book The Right Man, Bush speechwriter David Frum notes, "In the thirty-three years before September 2001, close to one thousand Americans had been killed by Arab and Islamic terrorists. . . . Only once in all those thirty-three years did an American president interpret a terrorist atrocity as an act of war, demanding a proportionately warlike response: in April 1986 when Ronald Reagan ordered the bombing of Tripoli after Libyan agents detonated a bomb in a Berlin discotheque, killing two American servicemen."

Frum points out that "all the rest of the time, the United States chose to treat terrorism as a crime to be investigated by the police, or a clandestine threat to be dealt with by covert means, or an irritant to be negotiated by diplomats."

So dismissive was the White House of the 1993 attack that even after the same terrorist group-al Qaeda-had attacked the same tar-get-the World Trade Center-a decade later, former White House adviser George Stephanopoulos minimized the 1993 assault, saying on December 30, 2001, that "looking back, it wasn't a successful bombing." He described the White House reaction at the time: "It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?"

Obviously, they should have.

But there was no effort to mobilize the nation, to sound the alarm, to reequip the military and intelligence apparatus to cope with the new threat. The government did nothing. Indeed, the director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey, later said he had not had a single private meeting with President Clinton through all of 1993 and 1994. Incredible.

Had Clinton zeroed in on the terrorist threat, he would have certainly made time for the director of the CIA. To fail to see him one-on-one during a period of terrorism would be as ludicrous as to deny the head of the Office of Management and Budget a hearing during the government shutdown budget crisis of 1995.

Clinton's Twin Allergies: Foreign Policy in General, Military Action in Particular

President Clinton rarely had his mind on terrorism in the opening years of his White House tenure. In early 1993, upon taking office, he and the first lady were focused on how to balance the competing needs of stimulating the economy and reducing the budget deficit. What scant time there was to discuss military policy in those first days was devoted to how to keep President Clinton's campaign promise to allow homosexuals to serve in the military, a commitment he fulfilled in an executive order issued right after he took office. The military was sent into an uproar by the move; then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell was reluctant to allow gays in the military without pre-cautions to prevent a breakdown in discipline. Soon the debate was swirling throughout the nation.

Abroad, the administration was largely preoccupied by the need to extricate American forces from a poorly planned and ultimately futile mission in Somalia. As he was leaving office, President George H. W. Bush had ordered twenty-five thousand troops to that east African nation to check a massive famine, deliberately exacerbated by local warlords.

"His parting gift to us," First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton called the involvement. She pushed the subject with her husband: "I keep telling him to pull them [the troops] out," she told me in a phone conversation in early February 1993, "but I have limited influence on foreign policy."

In fact, President Clinton himself felt he had similarly limited power over foreign affairs. Constitutionally empowered with virtual czarlike authority over international relations-in a way he never could be in domestic policy-Bill Clinton chose nevertheless to delegate most of his power to his two top advisers in the area: Secretary of State Warren Christopher and National Security Advisor Tony Lake. Concerned about his own lack of experience in foreign policy, Clinton began his first term by ruling over international affairs in name only, delegating any real power to the Christopher-Lake team.

Christopher is a lawyer; Lake is a liberal. The former was constantly ensnared in legalisms, the latter easily manipulated by the liberal foreign-policy establishment. Indeed, Lake had been given the office of National Security Advisor, in part, because the Post required no Senate confirmation. When Clinton later nominated him to be director of the CIA, at the start of his second term, the Senate's investigation of Lake's liberal record eventually persuaded Lake to withdraw his nomination.

In any case, neither Lake nor Christopher was president of the United States. While they could exercise strong influence, neither could commit the American people to the kind of mobilization that would have been needed for an all-out war on terror. Only the president could do that, and he was extremely reluctant to act, given his limited grasp of the subject.

When I signed up as his adviser, two years into Clinton's first term, I teased the president about his reliance on the Christopher-Lake regime in foreign affairs. "I think I'm beginning to see how Lake runs foreign policy around here," I said in March 1995. "There's a regency," I observed, referring to the way European monarchies appointed adult ministers to guide underage kings. "You're too young now to run your own foreign policy, so Lake and Christopher have to do it. But when you turn twenty-one they'll let you take it over."

The president stiffened slightly at my characterization. But he said only, "I never get other options; I never get other information."

Clinton saw foreign affairs as a subset of economic policy, rejecting the cold war view that it was related to global diplomatic and military manifestations of power. Deconstructing von Clausewitz's famous dictum that "war is diplomacy by other means," Clinton saw diplomacy as economics by other means.

As governor of Arkansas, Clinton was accustomed to dealing with issues of world trade and he felt at home stimulating the domestic American economy by manipulating global commerce. But he had no experience in foreign affairs, and political fallout from his Vietnam draft-dodging experience had left him with an allergy to military action.

The draft issue had first surfaced early in 1992, as Clinton sought to win the New Hampshire primary. He was hit simultaneously by two scandals, a combination that threatened to deck his candidacy in the early rounds: his adultery with Jennifer Flowers and his avoidance of military service. Together, the issues swiftly erased his early lead in the nation's first primary.

As the New Hampshire campaign approached its apogee, Clinton called me in a panic while I was on vacation in France. With his typical charm, he apologized for calling me at seven A.M., Paris time: "It's one o'clock here," Clinton explained. "I stayed up as late as I could so I wouldn't wake you up too early."

Then he got to the point. "I'm getting killed by the draft thing."

"And Flowers," I added.

"No," he interjected. "Our polls show Flowers isn't really hurting, but the draft is killing me, killing me," he repeated. "How should I answer it?"

He proceeded to give me a detailed and tedious account of how he had, he said, used only legal means to avoid service, stopping well short of the "string pulling" of which his opponents were accusing him.

"I don't think you can win on the draft," I answered. "I wouldn't try. Anything you do to talk about it just makes it a bigger issue. You took the lead in New Hampshire because you ran substantive commercials with real programs and new ideas about welfare, the economy, and other topics. Just go back to that. Put out a positive, exciting message, and I think you can come in second," I said.

"You think that'll work?" he asked doubtfully.

I wondered myself, so I took another tack: "Look," I said, "you're getting hit with two charges-the draft and adultery. The draft is hurting you, but the Flowers stuff isn't. Answer the Flowers stuff and use it to drown out the draft issue. It's sexier anyway-and that way everyone will pay attention to the disease that's not fatal and ignore the one that could be."

He did just that, finishing second in the primary and promptly declaring himself the "Comeback Kid."

But the scar of his near defeat over the draft lingered, a silent inhibition that consistently held him back from aggressive military commitment. No matter how often his soldiers and generals snapped to attention as he passed, giving him crisp salutes, the reality remained-having ducked the draft, Clinton never felt comfortable with the prospect of sending young men and women to face death when he had refused to risk it himself.

The Emerging Terrorist Threat, 1993-1996

It is never fair to assess a president's conduct entirely in the light of 20/20 hindsight. The question for future historians is: How well did the chief executive act, given the information available to him at the time? So, in assessing Clinton's performance in preparing us for the war on terror, we must ask: What did the president know and when did he know it?

The story of the investigation that followed the 1993 World Trade Center attack is instructive. At first, the bombing seemed the work of a Laurel and Hardy band of incompetent terrorists. Having sought to topple the Twin Towers, they had succeeded only in making a big hole in its lower floors. Investigators quickly determined that the bomb had been planted in a Ford 350 Econoline van rented across the Hudson River in Jersey City. When detectives staked out the location, they had trouble concealing their shock when, two days after the bombing, Mohammed A. Salameh showed up to collect his $400 deposit on the van. (Terrorists on a budget!) Soon the other conspirators were identified and arrested, with the exception of mastermind Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who had fled to Pakistan.

Yousef had entered the United States six months before the bombing, disguising his evil mission by pretending to seek political asylum. According to Steven Emerson's meticulously researched American Jihad, Yousef "soon emerged as an international link between the assailants and a network of supporters."

As Emerson recounts, Yousef had arrived in the United States "in the company of Ahmad M. Ajaj, a pizza deliveryman in Houston. Ajaj was detained at the airport for carrying three fake passports and other false identification." Ajaj was also found to be carrying "a letter of introduction recommending him for training in guerrilla warfare in Pakistan or Afghanistan." How, in the name of God, was he passed through to enter the United States?

Nevertheless, he was. And it is clear that, in the weeks after the bombing, this and other clues alerted the administration to the fact that the World Trade Center bombers were no isolated fanatics-but rather a group of conspirators with close ties to foreign terrorist groups. That alone should have put the White House on alert. As Richard Bernstein, who covered the bombers' trial for The New York Times, asked: "Who wrote Mr. Ajaj's letter of introduction? Why would he have to travel to the Middle East to obtain it? Whom did he see in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia? Where did Mr. Salameh, who was certainly not a wealthy man, get the $8,400 that he deposited into a bank account he opened jointly with Mr. Ayyad (another conspirator) and that prosecutors say was the bankroll for the operation? Did it come from abroad?"

An alert White House would have been all over these questions, weighing their implications for America and its future, and acting accordingly. The failure to heed these and other warning signs, and to mobilize fully our nation's resources to protect us against further acts of terrorism, are reason enough for a stinging indictment of the Clinton administration.

Clinton should also have known that the New York bureau of the FBI had been investigating Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric who came to this country after facing charges of attempting to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak (a charge of which he was acquitted). According to Emerson, the FBI was able to infiltrate an informer, Emad Salem, into the Jersey City group that surrounded Rah-man. "Salem carried hidden microphones and helped the FBI in planting a small video camera, recording the group as it made plans for a Day of Terror."

Emerson relates how these terrorists planned nothing less than "simultaneous strikes at the United Nations headquarters, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the federal office building" in lower Manhattan. These bombs would have dam-aged or destroyed the only links that connect midtown and downtown New York with New Jersey-tunnels and bridges used by millions of people each day.

In June 1993, when the FBI arrested Sheikh Rahman and nine of his followers, President Clinton must have been told that the terrorist groups in and around New York City were actively plotting massive destruction of high-profile targets. The World Trade Center had already been bombed, the United Nations and bridges and tunnels had been targeted. What else did the president need to grasp the gravity of the situation? Yet he never ordered any major shakeup of the antiterror apparatus. No extra tools were given to the FBI. No massive mobilization was declared. The government simply shrugged its shoulders; the bank robbers had been caught, after all; why make a fuss?

The most important link in the chain of evidence that should have alerted Clinton to the growing threat came in January 1995, when Yousef himself was finally arrested in Pakistan, two years after orchestrating the World Trade Center bombing. Under interrogation, Emerson writes, the terrorist leader said he had "hoped [WTC] Tower One would fall sideways into Tower Two" as a result of the bombing, "knocking over both and killing 250,000 people."

More important, an examination of Yousef's laptop computer revealed that he had "also participated in a plan to blow up eleven American jetliners within 48 hours-a disaster that was only barely avoided by chance."

One would have imagined that, at the very least, the president would have responded to the evidence of such a plan with a major air-safety initiative. Even if he wanted to avoid alarming the traveling public and jeopardizing airline revenues, one would think he would still have moved vigorously to tighten security, concealing the reason for his actions if necessary.

Instead, there was nothing. No action, no proposals, no initiatives, no direction. It was as if nothing out of the ordinary had been unearthed by the FBI. Why not?

Beyond Clinton's reluctance to engage the military, another factor was at play here: Bill Clinton was a one-thing-at-a-time president. In his White House, there was no back burner. Either an issue was in the forefront, occupying his undivided attention, or you couldn't expect to find it on his radar screen at all. Indeed, so far was the issue off the presidential priority list that the index to Bob Woodward's chronicle of the early Clinton presidency, The Agenda, contains not a single reference to terrorism or the World Trade Center.

Lurching from one issue to the next, Clinton devoted his attention in these early years to learning the ways of Washington. At first his attention was riveted on his futile attempt to pass an economic stimulus package to "jump-start" the economy. Keeping to his campaign promise to focus "like a laser beam" on the economy, Clinton then turned to his economic program-a combination of tax increases and spending cuts-which did much to reduce the budget deficit and gave Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan the room he needed to drive down interest rates.

Clinton spent 1994 preoccupied with his anticrime legislation, a mix of longer sentences, more prisons, an expanded death penalty, and gun controls, which passed narrowly and had a significant impact in reducing crime over the ensuing decade. What time he had left was devoted to the fortunes of his wife's health-care reform proposals, des-tined to die an agonizing defeat in Congress.

As 1994 drew to a close, Clinton traveled to the Middle East to help cement a diplomatic accord between Jordan and Israel, advancing the legacy of the Camp David accords of President Jimmy Carter. Clobbered in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton scrambled to respond to the Republican program of budget and tax cuts and to find his footing amid a Congress suddenly in the hands of his enemies.

I worked in the Clinton White House from late 1994 through late 1996. From November 1994 through February of 1995, I held seven private meetings, of two to three hours each, with President Clinton. In January, we worked together, in private, for six hours, drafting his State of the Union speech to Congress. In the course of these meetings, we spoke of every major issue he faced in our attempt to cope with the challenges posed by the newly elected Republican Congress. We delved extensively into policy initiatives about crime, law enforcement, and gun control, and we talked at length about how to strengthen his hand in dealing with foreign-policy issues.

Yet, in all those discussions, Clinton never mentioned a single word about the terrorist threat that was gathering around America. He did not allude to the World Trade Center bombings or to any of the evidence of further terror plans that had emerged since. The subject just wasn't on his mind, despite massive evidence flowing in from America's law-enforcement agencies.

Simply put, Clinton had no time for terrorism. Notoriously unable to delegate responsibility, compulsive in controlling the actions of his subordinates, Clinton was too busy juggling other issues to address the threat terrorism posed during these opening years of his presidency.

That is, until the end of 1994, when he was forced to face the first major foreign-policy crisis of his presidency-the imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons by the rogue regime in North Korea.

North Korea: The Feel-Good Deal That Left Our Security Dangling

On October 5, 2002, a bombshell burst: North Korea acknowledged, as The Washington Post reported, that it "has been secretly developing nuclear weapons for years in violation of international agreements." One official in George W. Bush's administration called it a "jaw drop-ping" revelation. The North Koreans were unapologetic; indeed, they were "assertive, aggressive about it."

As the Post reported, American assistant secretary of state James A. Kelly had presented the North Koreans with detailed evidence "of a covert nuclear weapons program" during a visit to the isolated state on October 3-October 5, 2002. After denouncing the allegations as "fabrications," the North Koreans "met through the night before deciding to reveal that the project had been under way for several years."

The revelation was doubly shocking in light of a widely hailed agreement the Clinton administration had signed with North Korea, in 1994, which was to have banned the development of atomic weapons or the diversion of fuel from North Korea's nuclear reactors. North Korea had agreed to suspend operations at its Yongbyon nuclear plant and to seal, under international inspection, used fuel rods that could have been reprocessed into bomb-grade material. the Post reported that the United States, Japan, and South Korea, in return, "agreed to arrange construction of two light-water nuclear power plants (whose fuel is less likely to be diverted to pernicious use) in North Korea and to provide 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil annually to generate electricity until the plants are built." The $4 billion cost of the reactors, and the bill for providing the fuel, was to be shared by the three allies.

The United States had kept its end of the bargain. But the North Koreans, apparently, had gone behind our backs and begun to build bombs using uranium it had highly enriched at a secret underground complex. In December 2001, The CIA's National Intelligence Estimate, according to The Washington Post, reported that the rogue state had likely had one or two nuclear bombs as early as the mid-1990s. Right under Clinton's nose.

It was a breach that called to mind the Nazi and Japanese treaty violations of the years before World War II. Pyongyang's actions were high handed, arrogant, sneaky, and duplicitous.

Clinton had been duped. Big-time.

The crisis with North Korea that led to the 1994 agreement in the first place began at the start of Clinton's term, when North Korea, as rogue as a nation can get, diverted nuclear fuel from its Yongbyon reactor in 1989 and was planning future diversions to build up enough material to produce five atomic bombs.

Clinton's foreign-policy team gathered itself for its first major test since its early confrontation with Haiti's dictatorship. Their efforts thus far to forge a coherent approach to international issues were widely regarded a joke.

The Washington Post reported that the challenge from North Korea "is the first time that the administration has tried to forge a coalition for a major strategic purpose. . . . The success or failure of Clinton's effort will be a gauge of administration diplomatic skills, which critics have found wanting in negotiations with allies over Bosnia, with military rulers in Haiti over the return of democracy, with Japan over trade and with China over human rights." A Clinton administration official added that Korea "is the primary test for the administration of acting through the Security Council."

Clinton began by threatening to impose economic sanctions to get North Korea to behave. He hoped that China would privately cooper-ate, to pull the noose even tighter. The sanctions would bar Koreans living abroad-primarily in Japan-from sending money to their relatives in the North, a key source of foreign exchange for the isolated government; ban arms sales to North Korea; and end economic aid from the United Nations. If Pyongyang did not give in, then full economic sanctions would be imposed. South Korea enthusiastically agreed to join the sanctions, and after some hesitation Japanese officials said they'd go along. A deal seemed in the making. For once, Clinton was showing some backbone.

News reports after Clinton left office speculated that the president may have been considering a preemptive bombing of the Yongbyon nuclear plant where North Korea was storing its spent fuel rods to pre-vent reprocessing. One wonders if these reports are accurate or just posturing by former administration officials anxious to justify their actions while in office. At the time, Clinton's foreign-policy team downplayed the idea that a military option was under consideration. The Washing-ton Post quoted "senior administration officials and independent analysts" as saying that the United States was "unlikely to initiate military action in Korea," saying that a conflict was "too risky." Among their concerns was that a preemptive strike might bring on a "radioactive explosion."

Clinton may have secured the agreement of Japan and South Korea to economic sanctions, but he may have been surprised to find he also needed former President Jimmy Carter's approval. Or so Carter himself seemed to believe: As if he'd never left office, the ex-president stepped in, uninvited save by North Korea, and cooled whatever resolution Washington might once have had.

Angering Clinton, Carter decided unilaterally to travel to North Korea to seek a way out of the crisis. Clinton had used Carter's services as a mediator earlier in his administration, asking the former president to smooth the way for the departure of the dictators who ruled Haiti and the restoration of democratic rule. Backed by a large naval and amphibious force waiting offshore to attack, the former president was able to orchestrate a bloodless transition on that troubled island.

But this time Carter's trip was forced on Clinton, presented to him as a fait accompli. When Carter made it clear that he was going to North Korea, Clinton had no choice but to bless the mission. "Frankly, he was going to go anyway and . . . we didn't want this to be some dispute," a senior administration official told The Washington Post.

Of course, there was one problem: Carter opposed administration policy. He was against sanctioning North Korea. Rather than traveling as an envoy of administration policy, in truth, he was looking to block it. But Carter's views had resonance within the administration's dovish foreign-policy team. As the Post reported, there was widespread fear among Clinton's top advisers that sanctions could provoke North Korea to oust U.N. inspectors and lead to a go-it-alone pursuit of nuclear weapons that might, they feared, "lead to possible war."

On June 16, 1994, Clinton and his top foreign-policy aides huddled in what the Post described melodramatically as "a grim council of war-discussing sending new planes, ships, and troops to South Korea for a possible horrible conflict" when the phone rang. It was Carter, calling from North Korea to tell him that he would "shortly appear on CNN to convey what the former president considered a dramatic breakthrough in the . . . dispute" with North Korea.

The scene must have been something to watch. the Post describes how "Vice President Gore, Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the others filed into a cramped office [adjoining the Oval Office], equipped with a television set, to watch Carter. They were flabbergasted when the former president described [North Korean dictator] Kim's promises as a 'very positive step' and urged the administration to withdraw a two-day-old proposal for . . . sanctions against North Korea. 'It looked as if we were contracting out our foreign policy, like we were bystanders . . . and had totally lost control of it,' a White House official later recalled."

Gore urged everyone to calm down, put aside their anger, and coolly analyze what was going on. But Carter's move had halted what-ever momentum there was for sanctions, and tough action was put on hold while the administration played out the Carter initiative, forced to do so, in part, by public hopes raised by the former president.

In reality, all Carter had gotten out of Pyongyang was what The Washington Post called "a small concession"-a "limited and some-what vague pledge to Carter . . . that North Korea would leave international inspectors in place at North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex, and freeze its accumulation of plutonium if Washington entered high-level talks," an offer it had made before.

But Clinton and his people seized on the gesture and followed the path of negotiation, its former determination to impose sanctions ebbing precipitously. The North agreed to freeze its nuclear program and, as The New York Times reported, "to allow inspectors to monitor where some spent reactor fuel rods were being stored. In return the United States agreed to resume negotiations with the North Koreas without other conditions."

In reality, North Korea had conceded nothing. The spent fuel rods were so radioactive that, as The Washington Post reported, they "cannot be reprocessed anyway for awhile while [they are] cooled in a storage pond." Republicans in Congress pointed out that "if North Korea wants to, it can find a reason to withdraw from the talks in several months and have enough plutonium . . . for four to five nuclear weapons. . . . Such an outcome would make Carter and the Clinton Administration look like dupes."

And dupes they were, as they abandoned their plans for coercion and grasped at the hope of negotiations.

In the meantime, Bill Clinton's presidency was entering a period of crisis. The disorganization and left-leaning policies of 1993-1994 were alienating even the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress. In August 1994, Hillary Clinton's vaunted health-care reforms went down to crashing defeat in the Senate. With congressional elections looming in November, Clinton needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat if he hoped to hold on to control of Congress.

North Korea was his rabbit. In late October 1994, just weeks before the election, the United States and North Korea struck a deal: Kim Jong Il, who had taken over as dictator of the North after his father Kim Il Sung died in July, agreed to "internationally monitored containment and eventual rollback" of its nuclear capability, as The Washington Post reported. In return, the United States, Japan, and South Korea agreed to provide food and fuel for North Korea and to fund its two light-water nuclear power plants.

Hailing it as a "gigantic political breakthrough," the Post breathlessly announced that the agreement "could end the specter of a rogue state's going nuclear."

From the start, however, there were reasons to doubt whether North Korea would keep its promise. Even as it celebrated the deal, the Post reported that "North Korea's record of treachery, its maintenance of a regime conducive to treachery and its leadership uncertainties compel great wariness." The Clinton administration was consequently careful to demand that the North Koreans "freeze and dismantle the graphite reactors [and] comply with the nuclear abstinence demanded under the Nonproliferation Treaty" before the United States had to deliver on its end of the treaty.

Republicans criticized the deal as a bribe to get North Korea to do what it had already committed to do as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Congress grew increasingly restive about voting the funds necessary for the implementation of the agreement.

Such concerns lay more or less dormant for four years, while Clinton basked in the apparent triumph of his diplomatic accord with North Korea. But suddenly, in August 1998, North Korea fired a multi-state ballistic rocket over Japan without warning. While North Korea "subsequently insisted that it was only trying to send a music satellite aloft to celebrate two imminent joyous events-the regime's 50th anniversary and the formal accession to supreme power of Kim Jong Il," as the National Review reported, the missile spoke volumes about the nation's warlike intentions. Kim's regime, already in possession of the world's third-largest arsenal of chemical weapons, had now developed the ballistic missiles it needed to deliver them.

After he left office, President Clinton feigned surprise that North Korea was cheating and developing nuclear weapons despite its commitments in 1994. He told interviewer Larry King, on February 6, 2003, that "it turns out they [North Korea] had this smaller laboratory program to develop a nuclear bomb with enriched uranium." He might not have said so explicitly, but Clinton's implication was clear: The development was news to him.

Don't be fooled: The revelation of North Korea's perfidy may have been a surprise to the world, but it was no surprise to Bill Clinton. As early as 1998, The Washington Post reported, U.S. intelligence had warned that the rogue nation was developing bombs in secret under-ground locations. But Clinton did nothing; indeed, he assured Congress that North Korea was in compliance with the 1994 agreement so that it wouldn't cut off the purse strings that funded the U.S. end of the deal.

In mid-August 1998, The New York Times reported that the U.S. intelligence community had detected "a huge secret underground complex in North Korea" that might be "the centerpiece of an effort to revive the country's ...nuclear weapons program." On August 18, The Washington Post reported that "U.S. intelligence analysts believe about 15,000 North Koreans are at work on a vast, secret underground nuclear facility, a development administration officials say may represent a decision by North Korea to abandon a four-year-old agreement to freeze its nuclear weapons program.

"Administration officials who have been briefed on the intelligence data, which includes imagery collected by spy satellites, describe a large-scale tunneling and digging operation in a mountainside about 25 miles northeast of Yongbyon, a former nuclear research center where North Korea is said to have produced enough plutonium for two nuclear weapons." Is it possible that the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government could find such a massive and crucial development and fail to report it to the president of the United States? Not in this world.

Indeed, the United States asked for a look at the underground caverns. North Korea first blustered and threatened and then asked for a cash payment of $300 million if the inspection failed to uncover suspicious work on a bomb. Later, the North Koreans said they wanted the $300 million up front for a one-time-only peek. Obviously the president would have had to have known about this exchange; indeed, he would have had to authorize the communication in the first place.

But, despite the evidence of massive cheating, Clinton did nothing and told Congress nothing was amiss. The Washington Post reported that "administration officials have told Congress that North Korea has not yet technically violated the [1994] agreement, despite its development of the [underground] caverns, because the Yongbyon facilities [identified in the treaty] have not been reactivated."

But Congress began to act. In late 1998, the Senate voted by 80-11 "to condition funding on a presidential certification that North Korea has halted all nuclear activities and has curtailed missile sales to nations classified by the State Department as supporters of terrorism." But Clinton continued to wink at North Korean aggressive moves, hoping against hope that the 1994 deal would remain in place.

Ever the master of semantics, the president, who had previously denied that what he did with Monica Lewinsky constituted "sexual relations," now maintained that the treaty with North Korea wasn't really a treaty at all.

The National Review reported that "American negotiators who hammered . . . out [the 1994 deal with North Korea] have repeatedly emphasized that it is not an 'agreement'-that it does not bind any party to specific actions or hold parties in noncompliance if given objectives are not met. 'Failure' of the 'Agreed Framework, consequently,' the officials maintained 'is very much in the mind of the beholder.' "

There is some evidence that North Korean diverted the fuel rods that it probably used to make atomic bombs even before Clinton took office. According to the congressional research service, North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor for seventy days in 1989, which "gave it the opportunity to remove nuclear fuel rods, from which plutonium is reprocessed."

Even if the crime took place on the first President Bush's watch, Clinton failed to address it in the 1994 Framework Agreement with North Korea, and he continued to send Pyongyang fuel and food even though he knew the regime may have already illegally developed nuclear weapons.

Clinton had wiped North Korea off his radar screen, never to return during his term. And there matters lay until Bush took office and discovered that North Korea had been industriously building nuclear weapons all along and likely had one or two in its quiver already.

By his willful blindness to North Korea's conduct and his wishful thinking that the regime would abide by the deal he had made with it in 1994, Bill Clinton had opened the door to one of the most serious threats to our national security since the end of the cold war.

When prompt action could have headed off North Korean noncompliance, Bill Clinton willfully and deliberately did nothing, allowing the North to build its bombs in its underground caverns.

And, as in so many other situations, he left the problem to George W. Bush.

The Crackdown That Didn't Happen-Clinton Refuses to Act to Deport Illegal Immigrants

"Make states issue driver's licenses [to immigrants] which expire when [their] visas do," I suggested to President Clinton on March 16, 1995, during a strategy meeting in the White House's East Wing. Noting that half of the nation's illegal aliens had evaded the system by overstaying their visas, I proposed a system providing for "automatic referral from motor-vehicles agencies to the INS" for deportation when routine traffic stops revealed drivers without licenses who were here illegally.

Raising these two issues-immigration and terrorism-with the president for the first time, I commented that, after all, it is through motor-vehicle law enforcement that most people come into contact with the police. If we could use that interface to catch illegal aliens, we could add mightily to the deportation lists. By interfacing the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and motor-vehicle computers, we could determine, immediately, if an unlicensed driver was just a minor scofflaw or in active violation of immigration laws.

The INS had no organized way of identifying and deporting the 150,000 foreigners who overstay their legal visas each year. Of the thirty-nine thousand deported each year during the mid-1990s, only six hundred were ordered to leave for having overstayed their visas. It seemed like an excellent idea to use motor-vehicle enforcement to identify and arrest those who were here illegally. But Clinton refused to pursue the idea. The idea ran into a solid wall of resistance led by White House adviser George Stephanopoulos. I pushed the proposal again at a meeting with Clinton on April 5, 1995, calling once more for "driver's licenses [to] expire when visas do." But no action was ever taken.

Stephanopoulos explained why in his 1999 memoir All Too Human:

Next on his [Morris's] list of potential presidential targets was immigrants. Basically, he wanted to create a background-check system that would turn your average traffic cop into a member of the U.S. Border Patrol. If, say, a police office spotted a suspiciously brown-skinned person driving a car with a busted tail-light, Dick's scheme would give him the ability to dial into a computer and order immediate deportation if the driver's papers weren't in order. Though he brushed off my fears of potential abuse and political harm to our Hispanic base, I persuaded him to hold off on the practical grounds of prohibitive cost.

The real story is a bit more complicated. White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes was charged with "vetting" the proposal through INS and the Justice Department. His answer was both decisive and shocking. "We can't deport the people we are already finding," he said. "If we expand the list of deportees without being able to act against them, the result would be a major scandal."

Even though I renewed the proposal at four subsequent meetings with the president, it was never adopted.

What a shame!

Three of the 9/11 hijackers had been pulled over by traffic cops in the months before 9/11. Had the drivers' license proposal been accepted, we might have sent them packing to the Middle East before they had their chance to fly airplanes into our buildings. In April 2001-five months before 9/11-Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, was stopped by police near Miami for driving without a license. He was summoned to appear in court, never showed up, a bench warrant was issued, and the matter ended. Had the motor vehicle/ INS/FBI interface been functioning at that time, the traffic cop would have discovered that Atta was in the country illegally, his visa having expired in January 2001. Atta would have been arrested on the spot and bound over to the INS for deportation. He might not have been in the United States to lead the 9/11 hijackers on their grisly mission.

That same month, Nawaf Alhazmi, one of the hijackers who later seized control of American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon, got a ticket (in Oklahoma City, of all places) for speeding.

And Ziad Samir Jarrah, one of the four hijackers of United Airlines 93, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, was pulled over on September 9, just two days before the attacks, for driving between ninety and ninety-five miles per hour on Interstate 95. As CNN correspondent Jonathan Aiken observed, "Before 9/11 there really was no terrorist wanted list that a state trooper or anyone in the state agency could turn to indicate that there was any federal interest in this individual. As far as the state police in Maryland knew, Jarrah was a law-abiding citizen. . . ."

Had such a list existed, or had the INS and FBI been interfaced with the motor-vehicle computers, things might have been different.

Something always came before fighting terrorism. Some other policy or political consideration always had priority. In this case, Stephanopoulos was likely close to the mark when he warned of the harm to Clinton's "Hispanic base." Since the vast majority of illegal immigrants-although not terrorists-came from Mexico and other Hispanic countries, any program of this sort might be stereotyped as encouraging racial profiling by traffic cops.

To the Clinton White House, it was just more important to be friendly to Hispanic voters in the short term than to hasten deportations, and thus protect Americans of all races, in the longer term.

Terrorism Strikes: Oklahoma City Bombing

My first word of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City came when Clinton called me while I was on vacation (in Paris again, as it happened). He was distraught, almost in shock: "Haven't you heard? Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people were killed." At first Clinton thought the terrorists were from the Middle East, but it shortly became clear that the culprits were domestic fanatics.

In the face of such an assault, I urged Clinton to use an address to the nation to propose bold steps to counter terrorism. He demurred. There was always a reason. "If I do that the FBI says that I might bring on a second attack. I've got to move carefully here. This is a dangerous situation."

As Clinton confronted the Oklahoma City bombing, with its 168 deaths, it became increasingly clear that he was more comfortable offering America spiritual leadership in the struggle to find meaning in the piles of rubble than he was in taking practical steps to thwart future attacks.

Abandoning the role of commander in chief in favor of the soothing tones of a mourner in chief, he told the grieving relatives of the Oklahoma City dead: "Today our nation joins with you in grief." He urged Americans "to purge [themselves] of the dark forces that led to this evil." In a reprise of John F. Kennedy's cold war injunction that those who thought freedom was in retreat should "come to Berlin," he said: "If anybody thinks Americans are mostly mean and selfish, they ought to come to Oklahoma. If anybody thinks Americans lost their capacity for love and courage, they ought to come to Oklahoma." The New York Daily News reported that "the President told the victims' families, many weeping, that wounds take a long time to heal. 'But,' he added, the healing 'must begin.' " Appearing on 60 Minutes, Clinton stressed the emotional and spiritual implications of the Oklahoma City bombing, using his enormous capacity for empathy to ease the suffering of those who had lost loved ones and of a nation in shock. Reaching eloquently into the nation's soul, Clinton drew spiritual conclusions from the bombing and gave advice on how to handle the aftermath. "The anger you feel is valid but you must not allow yourselves to be consumed by it. The hurt you feel must not be allowed to turn into hate, but instead into the search for justice. The loss you feel must not paralyze your own lives. Instead, you must try to pay tribute to your loved ones by continuing to do all the things they left undone."

As I watched the coverage, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop-for the president to make specific proposals to stop terrorism before it spread further. It seemed obvious that a climactic opportunity was being wasted. But each time we spoke, the president said he felt handicapped by the FBI and by the needs of the investigation.

He did say, as The New York Times put it, that he would "seek new authority for federal agents to monitor the telephone calls and check the credit, hotel, and travel records of suspected terrorists." Later, he supplemented this proposal with one to require that "taggants" be added to explosive materials to make them easier to track should they be used in terrorist attacks.

On the key issue, though, Clinton demurred. In the wake of Oklahoma City, the FBI asked for broader powers to investigate terrorist groups. As the Times explained on April 25, 1995:

Under current guidelines, the FBI is forbidden from investigating [terrorist or extremist] groups unless there is a "reasonable indication" that they are trying to achieve their goals through violence and explicit violations of the criminal laws. Following the Oklahoma City bombing, law-enforcement officials have complained privately that those guidelines hamper them from gathering the kind of information needed to prevent such tragedies. Under the proposal being considered, the FBI could infiltrate such organizations or use informers to keep track of their activities.

But the proposal to expand FBI powers ran into opposition from the Treasury Department in general and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) in particular. Faced with a split in his own ranks, Clinton flinched; in the end, he never proposed altering the ground rules for surveillance that had been tying up the FBI.

In his antiterrorist package, The Washington Post noted, Clinton had refused to abandon "the requirement that law enforcement officials prove there is 'probable cause' of criminal activity before a judge approves surveillance against a suspect." The FBI had sought such powers "to compile information on potentially menacing organizations . . . even when there is no evidence they are involved in criminal activity."

Part of the problem in battling terror during the Clinton administration was the attorney general, Janet Reno. When President Clinton told me, in the summer of 1995, that her appointment was "his worst mistake," he was alluding to a long series of anticrime measures torpedoed by Reno, on grounds ranging from civil rights to civil liberties to budgetary constraints to pride of authorship.

Bill Gertz catalogs just one of the ways in which Reno undermined America's ability to prepare for 9/11. When the Minneapolis office of the FBI was alerted to the flight lessons being taken by Zacarias Moussaoui, alleged to be al Qaeda's twentieth hijacker, agents sought access to his laptop computer. But FBI headquarters denied the request, citing the lack of probable cause that a crime had been or was about to be committed. Commenting on the decision after 9/11, John L. Martin, a former Justice Department official, told Gertz he believed "that if the FBI had gone to the career lawyers in the . . . Internal Security Section of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department, they would have been advised to go after the laptop on any number of legal grounds."

Why didn't they?

Because in 1994, Reno's Justice Department adopted new rules that barred the FBI from contacting the Internal Security Section of the Justice Department, as Gertz explains, "as part of an effort to control FBI activities in the intelligence arena."

Whether the focus was deportation of illegal immigrants or expanding FBI investigative powers, the harm Reno did to American national security in the fight against terror was incalculable.

As Clinton's adviser, I chafed at the administration's lack of substantive measures in the wake of Oklahoma City, urging, in vain, stronger steps to counter and prevent terrorism. While many of these ideas were tailored to combat the domestic terrorists who had killed so wantonly in Oklahoma City, they would have done much to move America's war against terror, both foreign and domestic, into high gear.

In a White House meeting on April 27, 1995, two weeks after the attack, I called on Clinton to reject "the tombstone approach which only acts after terrorism has happened." I suggested "preventative surveillance and public disclosure of terrorist group activities to save lives before criminal actions are committed."

Specifically, I suggested that Clinton move to curtail charitable donations to groups funneling funds to terrorists. I suggested that he create a " 'President's List' of extremist/terrorist organizations to warn the public against well-intentioned donations which might foster terror-ism." I urged "public disclosure of membership lists and donor lists by such organizations to aid in the investigative process."

The civil liberties crowd reacted with horror and rallied to persuade the president to kill the idea. Stephanopoulos recalls the play-by-play:

Dick wanted a "national crusade" against domestic terrorism. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings, Morris didn't think that you could be too tough on the militias. While Dick's read of public sentiment was unassailable, his proposals reminded me the advice his late cousin Roy Cohn used to give Joe McCarthy.

Morris wanted to require militia groups to register their guns and their membership with the FBI and he wanted the Justice Department to publish the names of suspected terrorists in the newspapers. I raised a civil liberties argument. "Oh, people don't care about that," he said. Then I countered with process, saying that if the attorney general wasn't on board (which she'd never be), Dick couldn't achieve his goal. Leaks from the Justice Department would only make Clinton look weak, and the paperwork would never emerge from the bowels of the bureaucracy unless the president typed it himself.

Stephanopoulos's comment is typical of how the White House staff sought to disempower the president. By threatening leaks and administrative noncooperation ("the paperwork would never emerge . . . unless the president typed it himself"!!!), they gleefully controlled this oft-weak chief executive. Can you imagine a White House staff member having the temerity to pull this kind of stuff on George W. Bush?

Clinton did issue an executive order in 1995 freezing the assets of twelve "foreign terrorist" organizations, mostly connected with the Palestinians. But it was only after al Qaeda's bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that "the Clinton administration began the first major effort to disrupt the network's financing," as The New York Times reported, by freezing the assets of al Qaeda. But, since the terrorist group wasn't so obliging as to hold a bank account in its own name, the order netted nothing.

Little was done to enforce even the limited executive orders on terrorist fund-raising President Clinton had issued. Before 9/11, according to The Washington Post, "the number of cases brought under those orders can be counted on little more than one hand. Nearly all have involved individuals and organizations whose money was allegedly being funneled to the Palestinian groups Hezbollah and Hamas. None of it has related directly to bin Laden or al Qaeda."

The New York Times reported that "beginning in 1999, midlevel Clinton administration officials traveled to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates [U.A.E.] seeking information about charities aiding al Qaeda. But Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. provided no assistance . . . with the embassy bombings receding into mem-ory, the administration largely moved on."

Former Carter domestic adviser Stuart Eizenstat, a key figure in U.S.-European relations, noted that "these visits were not followed up by senior-level intervention by the State Department, or for that matter by Treasury, to those governments. I think that was interpreted by those governments as meaning this was not the highest priority." To put it mildly.

Clinton's diplomats might have done more than just ask the Saudis about charities that aided al Qaeda. According to a report by Jean-Charles Brisard, an investigator hired by the United Nations to report on al Qaeda funding sources, Saudi Arabia transferred $500 million during the 1990s to the terrorist gang. As Brisard puts it: "One must question the real ability and willingness of the kingdom to exercise any control over the use of religious money in and outside of the country."

It wasn't until after 9/11 that the U.S. government, under President Bush, finally closed down charities that funneled money to terrorist groups. When Bush did move against al Qaeda's terror-funding sources, he found an extensive network of back-channel funding and moved aggressively-as Clinton could and should have done-to disrupt it.

The New York Times reported that a key element in al Qaeda's cash flow came from "a financial network called Al Barakaat, which owns an . . . informal remittance system that moves millions of dollars around the world with virtually no paper trail." Immigrants use Al Barakaat "to send money back home . . . where terrorist operatives siphon off a portion of it for al Qaeda." The terrorists charge a 5 per-cent fee on each transfer, a kind of terror surcharge.

Bush froze Al Barakaat's operations and, through an executive order, expanded the president's authority to block assets of foreign entities that aid terrorism. Why didn't Clinton do that? He had the power, just as Bush did. He had the intelligence information. It was already clear how dangerous al Qaeda was. Why did he leave the time bomb ticking?

Only rarely did Clinton actually oppose any recommendations to fight terror or even make an affirmative decision to put other priorities first. There was never a meeting where Clinton listened to the ideas, cleared his throat, and announced his decision. That wasn't how the White House worked in the 1990s.

Instead, the president would hear ideas proposed in staff meetings or at our weekly political strategy sessions on Tuesday or Wednesday nights in the East Wing residence. He usually remained silent, declining to comment on the proposals under discussion. Burned by leaks early in his term, when he was more forthcoming with his reactions, Clinton told me, "I have learned not to say anything in front of more than one other person."

His silence nevertheless sent a clear message to me and the others involved with his policies and message-"check it out." Run the idea by the various cabinet departments and agency heads and see what they think about it. Vet it by the National Security Council or the economic team and get their reactions.

It was at this stage that the proposals to battle terrorism usually ran into trouble. Without a clear mandate to put terrorism at the top of the national agenda, every idea ran into opposition at some point in the bureaucratic food chain. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms killed the FBI's proposals to expand its powers of surveillance over possible terrorists. Clinton wouldn't move against fund-raising fronts for terrorist groups, because Attorney General Janet Reno refused to agree. The administration decided not to stop illegal aliens from getting drivers' licenses, because the Immigration and Naturalization Service had too big a backlog of deportation cases already. Something was always more important than fighting terrorism.

And when one of these proposals ran into bureaucratic opposition, Clinton just let it die. The slightest hint of disagreement from a law enforcement, civil rights, or military perspective was enough to send him scurrying for cover.

Clinton wasn't this way on every issue-not on the domestic front, for instance. Clinton ran roughshod over his own liberal staff at the White House and at the Department of Health and Human Services to sign the welfare reform bill. When his Department of Education and Office of Management and Budget people objected to his proposal to offer tax credits to offset tuition for the first two years of college, he demanded that the initiative proceed on schedule. His Budget Office objected to his decision to propose a balanced-budget plan, but Clinton did it anyway.

But on issues of terrorism, defense, and foreign affairs, generally, he was always too wary of criticism to act decisively. He was never strong enough to take the kinds of stands necessary to override the stand-pat instincts of his bureaucracy.

Even those initiatives the president did take after Oklahoma City ran into opposition from the Republican-controlled Congress. Some-times their dissent was politically motivated-the GOP was always eager to deny the president an achievement on which he could run for a second term-but often it was based on their desire to protect the right wing, the GOP political base.

After Oklahoma City, terrorism was seen primarily as a threat from the extreme right wing. The skinheads, militiamen, gun nuts, white supremacists, and anarchist-libertarians of the radical right were portrayed as a subculture that gave rise to the Oklahoma City bombing, and it was against them that most national angst about terror was directed.

Immediately after the bombing in April 1995, congressional Republicans, who controlled both Houses, vowed to pass antiterror legislation within six weeks. Congress did, indeed, pass antiterror legislation in April-but not until April 1996, a full year after the bombing. Fearful of being lynched in public for failing to pass antiterror laws while America mourned the first anniversary of the bombing, Congress sent the president a watered-down bill that deleted his two most important proposals: expanded wiretap authority and the use of taggants to identify bombs.

His request for more wiretaps was omitted from the bill entirely. Clinton had proposed that federal wiretap procedures be revised so law-enforcement officials could "follow terrorists as they move from phone to phone." Under this measure, a warrant would allow agents to tap all phones the suspect used-cellular, wireless, in-home, or pay phones-rather than just one specific instrument. As Clinton noted, "This authority has already been granted to our law-enforcement officials when they're dealing with organized criminals," but Congress refused to allow its use in the fight against terror.

Clinton proposed that taggants ("trace chemical or . . . microplastic chips") be added to all possible sources of explosives (such as fertilizer), scattered throughout to permit, as he explained, "sophisticated machines [to] find bombs before they explode, and when they do explode, [to allow] police scientists [to] trace a bomb back to the people who actually sold the explosive materials that led to the bomb." As Clinton noted, taggants had been used in "Switzerland over the past decade [and have] helped to identify who made bombs and explosives in over 500 cases. When it was being tested in our country several years ago, it helped police to find a murderer in Maryland." Yet pressure from the National Rifle Association (NRA) eventually overcame the proposal; taggants did not make it into the final terrorism bill. The strange-bedfellows alliance of civil liberties groups and Republicans sympathetic to right-wing groups had killed both the wiretap authority and the taggants proposal.

The price America was to pay for kowtowing to the NRA became fully apparent when a pipe bomb ripped through the Atlanta Olympic Centennial Park in the summer of 1996. To date, authorities have not solved this crime. But, as Clinton pointed out in a radio address after the explosion, taggant technology well might have helped law-enforcement officials to trace the bomb.

Even after the bombing, all Clinton dared to ask of the Republican Congress was to conduct the study of taggants they had authorized, but not funded, in the previous round of antiterror legislation, and to ask that it be extended to study the safety of taggants in black or smokeless gunpowder. The Republicans wouldn't consider even this; two months after the Atlanta bombing, they tabled a Democratic amendment to fund the study, by a vote of 57-42.

The strange story of how the Clinton antiterror bill was gutted in Congress was laid out fully in a Washington Post article by Lally Wey-mouth on August 14, 1996. Noting that the legislation was emasculated by "a bizarre coalition dominated by the far left and the extreme right," she explained how the bill was "watered down [to deny] law-enforcement authorities tools needed effectively to combat the growing terrorism menace."

At the core of this "profoundly strange alliance" was a coalition between "the GOP's far right-led by Representative Bob Barr of Georgia- and the Democratic far left-mobilized by Representative John Conyers of Michigan."

Would the provisions for taggants and wiretaps have prevented the Atlanta bombing? Would they have led law-enforcement agents to the front door of those responsible? We will never know.

But we do know that President George W. Bush felt that the wiretap provisions in the Clinton bill were so important that they formed a key part of the post-9/11 antiterror bill he pushed through Congress. One cannot help but wonder: If the Republicans had been less blind and the Democratic left less self-destructive, would federal law enforcement have been more effective in preventing 9/11?

Nevertheless, the antiterrorism bill made a great photo opportunity for politicians of both parties. Twenty-two members of Congress gathered on the South Lawn of the White House for the bill signing, including Clinton's future opponent in the 1996 election, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.

Unfortunately, the substance of the bill was totally inadequate, especially in light of the 9/11 experience. Here's what it provided:

• Authorized $1 billion over four years to help federal officials, especially the FBI, monitor and catch terrorists. (Big deal: In the rush to catch up after 9/11, Bush had to increase antiterror spending by tens of billions in one year to make a difference after the true dimensions of the challenge became clear.)

• Restricted habeas corpus petitions by state and federal inmates and curtailed the power of U.S. judges to overturn convictions in state courts. (This was a rider attached to the bill by the Republicans; it was the only way they could get Clinton to sign it into law. It had nothing to do with terrorism.)

• Made foreign airlines using U.S. airports adopt, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, "the same stringent security measures as U.S. carriers." (These measures were not so "stringent" as to stop the 9/11 hijackings.)

• Tagged plastic explosives to make it easier to track bombs. (This watered-down version of Clinton's taggants proposal turned out to be useless in tracing the Atlanta Olympic bomber.)

• Banned fund-raising in the United States by foreign terrorist groups, as designated by the secretary of state. (Which Clinton had already done by executive order.)

• Banned financial transactions between Americans and terrorist states like Libya, Syria, and Iran. (This provision was, of course, of 100 no use in fighting terrorist groups that were not nations, such as al Qaeda.)

• Allowed Washington to deny visas for foreigners suspected of belonging to terrorist groups. (This provision sounds very good in the wake of 9/11, but it really amounts to very little. U.S. intelligence in terror-sponsoring nations is too limited-and diplomatic presence there is usually nonexistent-to permit us to identify who is dangerous and who is not.)

• Permitted faster deportation of foreigners convicted of crimes while in the United States. (While this measure makes sense, it has nothing to do with fighting terror. Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, said of the 9/11 hijackers: "While here [in the United States], the hijackers effectively operated without suspicion, triggering nothing that alerted law enforcement and doing nothing that exposed them to domestic coverage. ...They committed no crimes, with the exception of minor traffic violations. They dressed and acted like Americans, shopping and eating at places like Wal-Mart and Pizza Hut.")

• Made it a crime to use chemical weapons in the United States or against our citizens abroad. (Sure to send terrorists into a panic!) Congress had labored for a year on its antiterror package, but all it produced was this paltry list of half measures. The very limited nature of its scope and reach reflects, eloquently, the low priority terrorism received in official Washington in the middle of 1996.

The Pseudo-Sanctions Against Iran

If the Republicans were loath to approve antiterrorism measures at home that might annoy their more extreme right-wing supporters, they were determined to force Clinton's hand and make him take bold action against terrorists in the Middle East. Senator Alfonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) took the lead in 1995 by introducing legislation extending the U.S. oil embargo against Iran to limit the ability of foreign companies to assist Teheran in developing its oil and gas industry.

Clinton had imposed the embargo blocking U.S. companies from helping Iran's petroleum industry in the spring of 1995, after Secretary of State Warren Christopher was enraged by the decision of Conoco, a Du Pont company, to make a deal with Iran. The New York Times reported the Christopher "argued that the United States should take the lead in depriving Iran, an outlaw country, of the financial resources it needed to develop nuclear weapons or sponsor terrorist activities."

Before the embargo, U.S. companies had been investing more than $4 billion annually in Iran's oil industry. The American embargo, of course, cut off these deals, but European companies continued to do business with Iran. Senator D'Amato was anxious to stop foreign companies, whose nations did not honor the embargo, from taking up the slack and helping Iran earn more from its oil reserves. Spurred by the decision of Total S.A., a French oil refiner, to take over the Conoco deal, D'Amato's legislative proposals imposed sanctions against any foreign company that aided Iran's oil and gas industry. The penalties included a ban on the importation of their products into the United States, and a prohibition against loans to the company by any U.S. bank. The Federal Reserve Board would also be directed to bar any financial institution from becoming a primary dealer in bonds of U.S. origin if they had aided energy projects in Iran.

At first the administration dismissed the D'Amato bill as just partisan posturing, introduced to allow the New York senator to strut in front of his large, domestic Jewish community. But soon the legislation gained momentum, and Clinton was forced to take it seriously.

Angered at American attempts to block European companies from involvement in lucrative deals with Iran, the European Union (EU) blasted the legislation, insisting, as the Times reported, that the United States had "no basis in international law to claim the right to impose sanctions on any foreign person or foreign-owned company who sup-plies Iran with oil development equipment."

Clinton felt whipsawed by the conflicting pressures on the D'Amato bill. It was gaining momentum in the Senate, spurred by fear of Iranian terrorism, but the European Union was threatening to appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) if the bill passed. Clinton partially solved the problem by getting the Republicans to water down the legislation, dropping the crucial provision banning imports of all products made by companies doing business with Iran. The president hoped that this would cool European anger at the bill. The Senate passed the legislation in December 1995.

But Europe was still unhappy. Within the administration, Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger urged Clinton to oppose the legislation unless it included a provision permitting the president to waive the sanctions when he considered it in the "national interest." But the Republicans pressed hard for passage to impose broader sanctions against Iran.

Responding to European concerns and the cautious advice of his own National Security team, Clinton insisted on the national security waiver as the price for his signature on the bill. Complying with White House pressure, the House passed the watered-down legislation on June 20, 1996.

Europe still went ballistic, however, threatening retaliation if the sanctions were ever imposed on their companies. Germany was particularly sensitive. Anxious to assure Iranian repayment of its $8.6 billion debt, Berlin had been alarmed by the drop in its exports to Iran from $5.2 billion in 1992 to only $1.6 billion in 1995. Claiming that Clinton was only grandstanding before a domestic political audience, German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel said that it was "better to continue the dialogue with Iran rather than break off all contacts, introduce sanctions, and further radicalize Iran by isolating the country."

The Germans were right about one thing. Clinton was grandstanding when he signed the Iranian sanctions bill on August 6, 1996, days before the Republican National Convention nominated Bob Dole as his opponent. Piously, the president told our allies, "you cannot do business with countries that practice commerce with you by day while funding or protecting the terrorists who kill you and your innocent civilians by night."

But what Clinton didn't say when he signed the bill was that he never planned to enforce it. For the rest of his presidency, whenever a European company tripped the wire that should have led to sanctions, Clinton demurred, invoking the national security waiver. Hypocritical in the extreme, he had made a show of his toughness by signing a bill he never intended to use and by approving sanctions he never planned to impose.

Clinton may not have used the new law to stop Iran's oil industry from bankrolling terror, but the legislation certainly helped enliven his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention on August 29, 1996. In a speech that was breathtaking in its hypocrisy (in light of Clinton's subsequent willingness to waive sanctions against companies trading with Iran), the president told the convention: ". . . We are working to rally a world coalition with zero tolerance for terrorism. Just this month I signed a law imposing harsh sanctions on foreign companies that invest in key sectors of the Iranian and Libyan economies.

As long as Iran trains, supports, and protects terrorists, as long as Libya refuses to give up the people who blew up Pan Am 103, they will pay a price from the United States." (Applause)

Some price! Not a single company lost a single dollar, euro, franc, mark, pound, lira, peso, or yen as a result of U.S. sanctions against its investments in Iranian oil or gas fields. Not one.

If Americans were deceived by Clinton's posturing, Europeans weren't. As Clinton was signing the sanctions law, USA Today reported that "France, Germany and Britain, as well as the European Union, are among those who have threatened retaliation. But the hope in Europe is that 'after the elections, this law will be shelved or watered down,' says Steven Englander, economist with the Paris office of Smith Barney brokerage."

The Europeans had that right. The first real test of the new sanctions came in the fall of 1997, when The Washington Post reported that "French, Russian, and Malaysian oil companies . . . triggered a State Department investigation of whether they should be penalized under U.S. law for . . . developing a major offshore natural gas field in Iran."

Iran had been after capital to develop the gas field. the Post reported that "the Iranians scored their first major success last summer when Total S.A. of France, the giant Russian natural gas company Gazprom and the state-owned Petronas of Malaysia signed a contract to invest $2 billion in developing a gas field known as South Pars."

Six months later, the newspaper related how "Clinton's senior foreign policy advisers met late into the night . . . grappling with what might have seemed a straightforward decision: whether to impose legally mandated sanctions. . . . The administration appears paralyzed by the myriad arguments for and against sanctions."

The arguments were familiar. The supporters of sanctions said that the money from the gas field would go right into funding terrorism, while opponents worried that imposing them would injure NATO and hurt reformist forces in Iran. the Post reported that "according to some officials, the administration is basically content to postpone a decision because delay avoids potential negative consequences of a decision either way, while leaving the deterrent effect of U.S. sanctions hanging over other foreign companies."

Al D'Amato, the sponsor of the sanctions, warned Clinton that "if the United States does not take swift, decisive action to apply these available sanctions, we will have undercut our long-standing policy against Iranian terrorism."

In May 1998, Clinton caved in and waived the sanctions against foreign oil companies over the Iranian gas fields deal. All the president's strong words when he signed the sanctions bill in August 1996, which he repeated later that month at the Democratic National Convention, went up in smoke. When the challenge finally surfaced, Clinton ran for cover. Despite congressional action and his own commitments, sanctions were dead.

Bill Safire said it best in The New York Times: Dual containment against Iraq and Iran had been replaced by a "dual doormat" theory.

The Terror Summer of 1996

Sometimes, defenders of Clinton's record on terrorism plead that the national mood during his presidency was not sufficiently alert to the danger of attacks on our shores to permit him to take bold action. Certainly, there was never any real understanding of the magnitude of what could happen. Only a very few of the farsighted (such as former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman) could envision an attack of the severity of the 9/11 assault. But the national thermometer rose fairly high in the summer of 1996, as the focus on terrorism reached its greatest intensity. Three attacks, coming in close succession, attracted national attention and opened the political possibility of bold military action against foreign terrorists:

• On June 25, 1996, a bomb ripped through the Khobar Towers bar-racks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that housed hundreds of U.S. airman. The explosion left an eighty-foot crater; nineteen died and hundreds were injured.

• Three weeks later, on July 18, 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded in midair and crashed into the Atlantic about sixty miles east of New York City, thirty minutes after taking off from Kennedy Airport. All 230 passengers died.

• On July 27, 1996, just ten days after the TWA crash, a bomb exploded in Centennial Park, the center of the Olympic Games under way in Atlanta, Georgia. The blast killed 2 people and injured 111 others. It shocked a nation that had been following the games avidly on television.

Hindsight has dulled the memories of that difficult summer of 1996. The Khobar Towers barracks bombing was, of course, the work of al Qaeda. The Atlanta bombing was seen, at the time and since, as the likely work of domestic terrorists. While the cause of the TWA crash has never been finally determined, at the time it was widely believed to have been a terrorist incident. On July 19, 1996, the Boston Globe reported that terrorism was "the operating theory behind the FBI's investigation of the crash of TWA flight 800."

But the nation drew no distinctions among the three attacks, lumping them together under one broad heading: terrorism. Americans demanded action. But all they got from Clinton were speeches.

In this atmosphere, there began to assemble a critical mass of public opinion for a truly aggressive strategy, lifting antiterrorism to the top of the nation's political agenda. Had Clinton responded more vigorously, and used the national mood for more aggressive action against terror, 9/11 might never have happened.

Inaction on the Khobar Towers Bombing

When a truck carrying the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds of TNT exploded outside the Khobar Towers barracks in June 1996, President Clinton had his usual stern words for the attackers: "The explosion appears to be the work of terrorists, and if that is the case, like all Americans, I am outraged by it. The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished."

And yet, when the Saudi Arabian government discouraged FBI director Louis Freeh's efforts to investigate the attack, Clinton acquiesced.

The Khobar Towers bombing was bin Laden's second attack in eight months in Saudi Arabia. On November 12, 1995, he had orchestrated a bombing of the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The U.S. military had used he building to train Saudi troops; five Americans were killed in the bombing. The Saudi government promptly arrested and quickly executed four men blamed for the attack. U.S. officials were never permitted to interrogate the suspects.

After the Khobar Towers attack, The Washington Post reported that "U.S. officials . . . suspect a link between the two bomb blasts." It mentioned that the Saudi government had "undermined" American efforts to "gauge the full scope of the threat to American military forces in Saudi Arabia" by its "reluctance to cooperate fully with U.S. investigators and intelligence analysts."

The dead men who the Saudis executed after the Riyadh attack told no tales.

For their part, the Saudis, according to the Post, "denied any friction between U.S. and Saudi investigators and said there was 'total cooperation' in the Riyadh bombing probe." the Post article, however, told a very different story. "Saudi security officials held one of those eventually convicted of the Riyadh bombing for three months, and the other three for one month, before they informed any officials at the U.S. Embassy there. The Saudi government was 'adamant about not letting us in there' to interview the suspects before they were executed, the official said."

The newspaper quoted a senior U.S. law-enforcement official as saying: "They [the Saudis] didn't let the FBI interview these guys and then they killed them." The official speculated that the Saudis did not want the United States to interview the bombers because it was "fearful of what we might find out once the United States gets a complete picture of those connected to the Riyadh bombing or to dissident movements."

As we now know, that trail would have led straight to Osama bin Laden.

Understandably, U.S. law-enforcement officials were worried that their leads in the Khobar barracks bombing would be cut short by the Saudi's busy executioner. They were right.

The Washington Post reported that FBI director Louis J. Freeh traveled three times to the kingdom to "seek U.S. access to several individuals who have been detained by the Saudi government on suspicion of involvement in the Dhahran bombing." Chafing at the lack of Saudi cooperation, the paper quoted U.S. defense secretary William J. Perry as saying: "We cannot accept the problems we had the last time."

Despite U.S. entreaties, Assistant FBI Director Robert Brant told a congressional committee that "the Saudi Arabian government has pre-vented FBI investigators from interviewing any civilians who witnessed or may have been involved in the bombing."

His boss, Louis Freeh, was more diplomatic in his testimony: "We have not gotten everything we have asked for and this has affected our ability to make findings or conclusions or to channel the investigation in different directions. There is a great deal of information we have not seen."

It was not until June 21, 2001-five years after the bombing, and well into the Bush administration, that the United States indicated thirteen Saudis and one Lebanese for the bombing of Khobar Towers.

Why did Clinton permit the Saudis to drag their feet in cooperating with the investigation? Why was not more pressure put on our so-called allies to be forthcoming with their witnesses and evidence? The former president's failure to be more aggressive in pushing the Saudis ranks as a key intelligence failure.

A glimmer of what we might have learned had Clinton pursued the issue came in a 1997 CNN story headlined "Wealthy Saudi May Have Had Role in Khobar Bombing; An Investigation Is Under Way." Introducing bin Laden to the American public as an "elusive Saudi dissident," the network noted that "a criminal investigation being conducted by the U.S. attorney in New York City turned up two bin Ladin statements to newspapers and to CNN calling for a holy war against U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia."

We will never know what Bill Clinton might have learned, had he put finding the terrorists who killed nineteen American servicemen ahead of smoothing Saudi Arabia's diplomatic feathers as a diplomatic priority.

More of Same: Olympic Bombing of 1996

At one point, as the summer began, it seemed as if President Clinton had gotten the point. Traveling to the fourteenth-century French town of Pérouges to meet with the G-7 world leaders, Clinton moved terror-ism to the top of the agenda. Calling the need to fight terror "one of the great burdens of the modern world," Clinton got the leaders to declare, "We consider the fight against terrorism to be our absolute priority."

The Boston Globe of June 28, 1996, rhapsodized that "by success-fully pushing his terrorism proposals, Clinton dominated the early agenda of the three-day summit, relegating many of the anticipated complaints over U.S. trade policies to secondary status."

After the Olympic bombing, Clinton seemed determined to take action. "We will spare no efforts to find out who was responsible for this murderous act," he said. "We will track them down, we will bring them to justice, we will see that they are punished."

But, in fact, Clinton did almost nothing to give effect to his words. He just dusted off his old proposals for taggants and wiretap authority and sent them to Congress.

It wasn't for lack of national consensus that Clinton acted so timidly after the terrorist attacks of the summer of 1996. His polling reflected a tremendous national focus on terrorism and its dangers. In a survey conducted for the president on June 6, 1995, before any of the three terrorist attacks, voters rated the battle against terrorism as our top foreign-policy issue, with 92 percent saying it was very important.

But after the trio of terrorist tragedy had struck in the summer of 1996, the national outcry grew. The president's poll of August 1 reflected the mood of tension and the desire for bold action. Asked if they would approve of "military action against suspected terrorist installations in nations that harbor terrorists or assist terrorists even if they didn't explicitly sponsor a terrorist act"? Voters backed action by 77-21.

By 84-14, they supported expanded wiretap powers, and by 77-19, they wanted the military to be involved "domestically and abroad to pursue terrorists."

The mandate for action was clear. The administration response was not.

The Air-Safety Debacle

Particularly in the area of air safety-after the TWA 800 crash-the public clamored for effective action. The history of attacks on passenger aircraft was prolific to anyone who sought to examine it.

• A year and a half before, in December 1994, Iraqi national Ramzi Yousef had admitted to detonating a bomb aboard Philippine Air-lines Flight 434, ripping a two-foot-square hole in the fuselage while the plane was flying from Manila to Tokyo. After an emergency landing, one passenger died, and ten were injured.

• In December 1988, a Pan Am flight crashed over Lockerbie, Scot-land, killing all 259 on board. Two Libyan terrorists have been convicted of the attack.

• On November 29, 1987, a North Korean agent planted a bomb on a Korean Airlines flight from Baghdad to Bangkok, killing all 115 on board.

• On April 2, 1986, a woman carrying a Lebanese passport, acting on behalf of a Palestinian terrorist, brought a bomb onto a TWA flight from Rome to Athens, killing four Americans, who were sucked through the aperture, and injuring nine others.

• On June 22, 1985, an Air India plane flying from Toronto to Bombay blew up near Ireland, killing all 329 passengers. The bomb that brought down the flight had been planted by Sikh extremists. With so ghastly a history of air terrorism, public demand for greater protection in the skies escalated rapidly after the TWA crash. A survey I conducted for the president on July 24, 1996, indicated strong public support for dramatic measures to counter aircraft hijacking and bombing.

By 90-7, voters backed "modern X-ray machines at airports to examine all checked luggage."

By 92-6, they supported federalizing security personnel who worked at American airports.

By 92-6, they backed requiring photo identification for all air passengers.

Does this list of measures sound familiar? None were implemented by the Clinton administration, despite such broad public support. But each became public policy in the wake of the 9/11 hijackings. Unfortunately, none were in effect early enough to have prevented the attacks in the first place.

Instead of taking the bold actions suggested by some of his advisers, though, the president simply punted. He appointed a Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, to be headed by Vice President Al Gore, to report on steps to improve air safety (after the election, and after the furor had died down). Clinton raised high hopes for the commission in his acceptance speech to the Democratic Convention, loudly proclaiming: "We will improve airport and air travel safety. I have asked the vice president to establish a commission to report back to me on ways to do this. But now we will install the most sophisticated bomb-detection equipment in all our major airports. We will search every airplane flying to or from America from another nation-every flight, every cargo hold, every cabin, every time." (Applause)

What really happened after these far-reaching promises? Not much. After receiving Gore's report, on September 10, 1996, Clinton proposed to spend $429 million to improve security at U.S. airports as part of a $1.1 billion plan to fight terrorism worldwide.

USA Today reported, "The plan includes provisions to increase the number of federal agents guarding against terrorism, equip the nation's airports with high-tech bomb detection devices and track by computer passengers with suspicious travel patterns." Clinton also ordered immediate implementation of a requirement that all bags be matched to passengers on an airplane as a precondition of takeoff, a measure that reflected the happy assumption that no terrorist would ever choose to commit suicide. Clinton also ordered criminal background checks of airline workers and the deployment of bomb-sniffing dogs at key airports.

Based on these totally inadequate measures, Clinton predicted that "not only will the American people feel safer, they will be safer." Nowhere in Gore's recommendations or in Clinton's proposals were the key measures his advisers had recommended and polls indicated voters approved: federalization of air-safety workers, photo identification for air travelers, and X-ray examination of all checked baggage.

In fact, Clinton immediately ran into trouble on the only really important part of his air-safety program. Buried in its text was a recommendation to spend $10 million on "automated passenger profiling." The administration said the program would be "based on information that is already in computer data bases." It would separate "passengers who present little or no risk and a small minority who merit additional attention."

The New York Daily News noted, "The commission was intention-ally vague on which passengers would get extra eyeballing, but said that travel histories spun out by the computers might trigger alarms if the passenger showed frequent flier miles to Iran or Libya." The left was outraged. "Rounding up the usual suspects may have been okay in Casablanca, but it's not okay in America," said Gregory Nojeim, legislative counsel for the ACLU.

The ACLU might have spared themselves the trouble of issuing the statement. Gore's recommendations for profiling didn't amount to much. Ultimately, the airlines voluntarily implemented their own system to decide who was a risk and who should get extra attention. The FBI and other law-enforcement agencies objected that the system wouldn't work and that it was based on far too limited data to be effective.

The Gore commission's final report, published in February 1997, was timid, its recommendations quite limited. USA Today commented that "Vice President Gore's Aviation Safety and Security Commission had the opportunity to effect dramatic reforms making U.S. flying safer. Unfortunately, the commission opted for a slow flight and an uncertain landing."

Forever addicted to hyperbole, Clinton said he would use "all the tools of modern science" to make air travel safe. Unfortunately, he failed to use even basic political science to get even the limited recommendations of the Gore commission approved. The commission's pre-diction- that its proposals would cut aviation disasters by 80 percent over the next ten years-is laughable in the aftermath of 9/11.

USA Today noted the holes in the commission report: "The com-mission instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to mandate security upgrades such as installing more explosive detection devices at airports, but it didn't say when. The commission recognized the critical need for criminal background and FBI fingerprint checks for airport and airline employees with access to secure areas. Yet it gave the airlines until mid-1999 to do so."

The commission recommended a similarly leisurely schedule for implementing the requirement that checked bags be matched with passengers on the plane. In its preelection-day report, Gore had recommended bag match testing within sixty days. Now he approved a delay until the end of 1997 before starting the plan and set no deadline for total compliance.

Gore's stress on bag matching was a good example of entering a new challenge perfectly prepared to meet the old one. The 1988 explosion that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland had been traced to an extra passenger-less bag, with explosives.

But the idea that bag matching would be effective, in a world of suicide/ homicide bombers, is itself ridiculous, indicative of the stultified thinking of the Clinton/Gore era. Gore did not even recommend fire suppression or smoke detection systems in the cargo holds of passenger airlines, the shortcoming that contributed to the death of 110 people aboard ValuJet Flight 592, which crashed in Florida in May 1996.

But even the limited steps recommended in the Gore report were watered down in Congress. Mark Green, in his book Selling Out, documents the efforts of the Air Transport Association, the lobbying arm of the airlines, to dilute, delay, or dismember the Gore recommendations.

The ATA has used extensive lobbying and contributing to delay Congress from enacting the suggested requirements. In 2000, it lobbied to weaken legislation that would have mandated background checks for all airport screeners. That year, the top nine airlines plus the ATA spent $16.6 million on lobbyists, ten of them former members of Congress, two of them former secretaries of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA, and another three former senior officers at the FAA. There were 210 lobbyists in all, and with their help the industry was successful in curbing new regulations.

When these same airlines now plead for help in the face of declining air travel after 9/11, they should be ashamed of their opposition to safety and antiterrorism measures in the 1990s, and realize how shortsighted and self-destructive their positions were.

The magnitude of the missed opportunities during the summer of 1996 cannot be exaggerated. The critical mass of public opinion and outrage was there to permit real action on air safety and terrorism. But Clinton and Gore-and the airlines themselves-blew it.

As a result, even if Bush and Cheney had realized the magnitude of the threat America faced in the months before 9/11, there was no way they could have acted effectively to keep the hijackers off the airplanes. With no system in place to check the identity of those traveling, no special training for security screeners, and no requirement for early boarding to allow time for thorough body searches, there was nothing they could have done to stop the hijackings. That fight was lost in 1996, when Clinton and Gore failed to act.

Iraq: Saddam Plays Clinton

When George H. W. Bush handed the White House over to Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein was as completely under wraps as it is possible for a foreign leader of a sovereign state to be. His nation was blocked from selling oil and swarming with U.N. inspectors. Without revenue or the privacy in which to rearm, Saddam and his shattered military posed little international threat.

But when Clinton passed power to Bush's son eight years later, Iraq was frantically rearming, its coffers bulging with $40-$60 million income daily from the sale of 2 million barrels of oil. Arms inspectors were nowhere to be found, having been thrown out of the country by the Iraqi dictator. Saddam was building a war machine that would once again frighten the world with its potential for deadly weapons of mass destruction.

How did Saddam get Clinton to let him off the mat? It was like taking candy from a baby.

Each year brought a new demand from Saddam Hussein-to loosen sanctions, increase his oil revenues, curb inspectors, and, eventually, restore his complete freedom of action. His pattern repeated itself like a knitting stitch-back one, forward two.

First, Saddam would announce that he was going to refuse to honor some aspect of his agreement with the United Nations, cemented amid the ashes of his utter rout in the Gulf War of 1990-1991. Then the world would convulse in crisis. Emergency negotiations would ensue; Saddam's allies-France and Russia-would press for concessions.

Clinton would rattle his saber by bombing or sending troops to the Gulf. Then Saddam would seem to give in to U.S. demands. American foreign-policy officials would deny that they had made any concessions, and Clinton would take the bows for standing up to Saddam. Then, quietly, after the world's attention had shifted, the United States and the United Nations would grant some concession to Saddam as the previously agreed price for his keeping his past promises, all the while denying that they were ceding anything.

As long as Saddam was willing to be "humiliated" before the American public and let Clinton play the part of the tough and resolute president on the public stage, he could get away with anything-and eventually did.

Just three months after his inauguration, Iraq began to test Clinton's resolve. It plotted to kill former President Bush by exploding a car bomb during his post presidential visit to Kuwait on April 14-April 16, 1993. After two months of investigation, Clinton determined that the plot had been orchestrated by Iraq. (No!) On June 27, 1993, Clinton dispatched twenty-three Tomahawk missiles to attack the Iraqi intelligence headquarters where the plot had been hatched. Calling his response "firm and commensurate" with the offense, Clinton told the nation, "We will combat terrorism. We will deter aggression. We will protect our people."

Like schoolmates sizing each other up on opening day, the bully Saddam took his measure of the ingenue Clinton-he would bomb but not invade. Bombing, Saddam could take. You can't get removed from power by bombing, absent the unlucky hit.

Saddam had two problems when Clinton took office: He needed to lift the embargo on the sale of his oil, and he had to get rid of the U.N. inspectors so he could spend the proceeds on arms rather than on food. Throughout the Clinton administration, Saddam worked first on one end of his problem, then on the other, like a man flexing first one wrist and then the other to loosen the ropes that bind him. Saddam began by persuading Turkey to sell 12 million barrels of Iraqi oil stuck in a pipeline on its territory, resulting in $120 million in revenues to Saddam.

While noting that the Turkish plan "does have some elements" that might violate the strict ban on the sale of Iraqi oil, Western diplomats let the sale go through while Secretary of State Warren Christopher "expressed U.S. determination to resist any easing of U.N. sanctions."

As Iraq showed the world photos of its starving children, liberal and humanitarian pressure grew for easing of the sanctions throughout Clinton's first term. Saddam used the 20 million Iraqis, suffering under his boot, to strengthen his case to let him sell his oil.

When the United States and the United Nations would offer to permit oil sales under strict controls, Saddam would refuse, denouncing it as a violation of his national sovereignty. Aware that international pres-sure to drop the sanctions would grow as long as he let his people starve, Hussein held out for terms that would permit him to divert the oil revenue to rearmament.

Meanwhile, France and Russia demanded an end to all sanctions against Iraq. That put Clinton in the position of pushing to allow Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil to buy food, as an alternative to ending the sanctions.

When Saddam rejected two U.S.-British proposals in 1995-1996 to let him sell his oil under strict controls, the Iraqi dictator turned them down as an "insult" to his country's sovereignty. That sent U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali scurrying to negotiate with Saddam, seeking a way to start a flow of humanitarian aid, while the United States and the United Kingdom made a show of vigilantly scrutinizing potential deals so that Iraq could not "manipulate the oil sales agreement for its own ends," in the words of The New York Times.

So Saddam had manipulated the world into pressing him to agree to sell his oil, under a regimen that would control his use of the money, to assure that it went for food for his people. At first, Baghdad seemed to resist U.S. and British plans for restrictions on the oil-for-food program, yielding only reluctantly to international pressure for strict controls.

In reporting the deal, The Washington Post noted that "Iraq must accept stringent U.N. monitoring to ensure that the money is not used to buy weapons, luxury goods, or other items of benefit to Saddam's regime. . . . In particular, the United States and its allies insisted success-fully on U.N. supervision of the banking arrangements for oil sales, minute U.N. scrutiny of how humanitarian supplies are to be distributed, U.N. control over delivery of aid to the breakaway Kurds in northern Iraq, and widespread discretionary power for U.N. monitors."

But Saddam had already achieved the biggest part of his goal. He could sell his oil. Now he set to work on the other half of his agenda: circumventing the limitations on what he did with the money.

The so-called controls were a sham from the beginning. Iraq was allowed to sell seven hundred thousand barrels of oil daily, a total that ultimately swelled to almost 2 million (two-thirds of its pre-Gulf War total). In return, Saddam had to abide by only the loosest of actual controls over the Iraqi use of the funds it generated. The restrictions the Clinton administration negotiated largely related to peripheral aspects of the deal, rather than to the core issue of preventing the use of the bulk of the money for restoration of Iraq's military and Saddam's regime.

The safeguards included letting the United Nations choose the bank that would handle the oil transactions and reliance on U.N. statistics in determining priorities for the distribution of the aid.

But Saddam realized, as Clinton apparently did not, that oil is fungible. Once the restriction on selling Iraqi oil was lifted, nobody could be sure that the oil a nation used was "legal" (i.e., allowed under oil-for- food) or "illegal" (i.e., smuggled) oil. It all looked the same-black.

Senator Frank Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska who chaired the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, explained in 1999 how Iraqi oil ended up as arms for Saddam. "Illegally sold oil is moving by truck across the Turkish-Iraqi border. A more significant amount is moving by sea through the Persian Gulf. Exports of contraband Iraqi oil through the Gulf have jumped some fifty fold in the past two years to nearly half a billion dollars. Further, Iraq has been steadily increasing illegal exports of oil to Jordan and Turkey."

Absurdly, the national media interpreted Iraq's willingness to accept these weak restrictions on the oil sales program as evidence of restive-ness among its 20 million people. Saddam must have been feeling the heat from his starving millions at home, the media explained. But Bob Dole, Clinton's 1996 adversary, had it right. The deal gave Saddam "a source of revenue" with which to continue "his reign of terror." Piously, the administration rejected Dole's criticism, saying that the accord had "adequate safeguards against abuse."

Saddam Hussein had read Clinton like a book. He knew that oil prices had risen in 1996. He saw that the U.S. president's desire to keep them down as his reelection approached would make him accept any deal Saddam offered. Which OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) leader would forget the total disarray into which American politics was thrown by the gas lines, price hikes, and oil shortages of the 1970s, bringing down first Gerald Ford and then Jimmy Carter?

For Clinton, gas prices had a special political piquancy. It was his decision to raise the gasoline tax by a nickel in 1993 that cost him control of Congress in the midterm elections and his increase in car license fees that cost him the Arkansas governorship in 1980 after only two years in office. "Don't mess with their cars" became a political axiom in the Clinton White House.

By first allowing Saddam to sell oil and then by increasing the amount he could export, Clinton was relieving pressure on oil prices. With Republicans embarrassing him by pressing for repeal of his 1993 gas tax hike and pump prices mounting, Clinton doubtless saw the loosening of controls over Iraq as a way out of a tough political problem.

It was one thing to be able to sell oil but quite another to be able to use the money to rearm. To rebuild his military machine and to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, Saddam had to get rid of the U.N. inspectors. As The Washington Post reported, the key protection against misuse of the oil-for-food money was the provision that U.N. "officials monitoring the agreement are given full freedom to travel around Iraq."

Once the inspectors were gone, Saddam correctly reasoned, the restrictions on the use of the oil revenues would become ineffective and he could rearm in peace as he prepared for war.

Saddam started his effort to kick out the inspectors by refusing to allow them access to his dozens of presidential palaces. Then, in November 1997, Saddam announced that he was barring Americans from the U.N. inspection team, denouncing them as "spies." When the U.N. inspectors insisted on keeping U.S. representatives in the group, Iraq barred them all from carrying out their work. In response, the inspectors left Iraq altogether.

The New York Times reported that Clinton appeared to respond aggressively by sending "2 aircraft carriers and about 300 warplanes, including the latest F-117A Stealth fighters, plus a score of warships and defense units bristling with Patriot missile batteries, and 18,000 personnel," to the Gulf. In addition, "six B-52 bombers took off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for Diego Garcia, the British base in the Indian Ocean. The Pentagon said its 'air expeditionary force,' a special 32-plane combat unit previously announced as being on standby, had been ordered to proceed to the region. . . ."

The old charade-frantic negotiations followed by an apparent concession from Saddam-began again. On November 21, 1997, Sad-dam seemed to back down and allow U.N. inspectors to return, with Americans among them. In response, Clinton postured, as usual, saying: "Saddam Hussein must comply unconditionally with the will of the international community."

Shrewdly, Francis X. Clines, of The New York Times, read between the lines and speculated that the deal "was immediately followed by questions about whether Iraq might have won some secret concessions or understandings through Mr. Hussein's gambit of openly challenging the terms of his defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991."

National Security Advisor Sandy Berger defiantly answered, "There is absolutely no understanding. There's no deal. There's no concessions."

Well . . . not so fast. French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, who criticized Clinton for giving Saddam "the impression that 'there would never be a way out of the tunnel [of sanctions]' even if he got rid of all his weapons programs," noted that "the Americans bent a little" to the demands of Saddam Hussein.

In fact, Berger indicated that an increase in the allowable levels of Iraqi oil sales "might not be opposed by the Administration 'at some point,' " but he hastily added that the subject "never even came up" at the Geneva negotiations.

Six days later, Jim Hoagland pieced more of the story together in The Washington Post. Once again, Clinton was being very, very precise in his use of words in order to mislead the American people into believing that he had made no concessions to Iraq in return for the readmission of the inspection team.

Clinton was technically correct-he had made no concessions to Iraq. He made his concessions to the French and the British, "to allow him to credibly deny making any concessions to . . . Baghdad."

In fact, Clinton had agreed to expand the oil sales "if Saddam would rescind his misbehavior over the U.N. inspectors." Clinton also dropped his earlier insistence that the United States would maintain sanctions as long as Saddam was in power and,

Hoagland reported, "raised the threshold for any new U.S. effort to overthrow Saddam to the point of ruling it out," by making clear that he would not attempt to oust Saddam by covert means and that only through a massive American military campaign could the Iraqi dictator be removed from power.

Hoagland's Post article explained that the net effect of Clinton's backpedaling was that "under pressure from U.S. allies, Clinton no longer seeks an alternative to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He is willing to live with a dictator two American presidents have portrayed as a mass murderer days away from creating an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. On Iraq today, America does not rally the allies, but rallies behind them."

Some contrast with George W. Bush!

Saddam had given up nothing. In return he had gotten his oil sales revenue expanded and pocketed a U.S. guarantee against clandestine efforts to remove him from power. Now he had only to get rid of the pesky inspectors who, The New York Times reported, were getting inconveniently close to finding something, having uncovered "stores of deadly nerve agent VX and of botulinus and anthrax toxins."

Back in Iraq, the Times reported, the U.N. inspectors walked on eggshells as Iraq insisted that they "should avoid sensitive sites and property belonging to President Saddam Hussein." As the Iraqis put it, the inspectors "should avoid coming near sites which are part of Iraq's sovereignty and national security."

The week after his barring-U.S.-inspectors gambit, Saddam was back with another move. This time, he announced that he would not agree to an extension of the oil-for-food program-in effect, holding his 20 million people hostage-unless the program's restrictions were loosened. Rushing to accommodate him, U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan indicated that he would suggest raising by 50 percent the amount of oil Iraq could sell, citing reports of starvation among Iraqi children. Sad-dam now had his daily oil sales up to 1 million barrels per day, a third of his prewar total.

Finally, on November 2, 1998, Saddam Hussein dared to make his big move: He barred U.N. weapons inspectors from continuing their inspections, demanding an end to the trade embargo and a restructuring of the inspection team to reduce the American presence.

Reacting sharply, the U.N. Security Council condemned the dictator's decision and demanded that Iraq let the inspectors resume their work "immediately and unconditionally," insisting that any review of sanctions must come after proof that Iraq had disarmed.

Saddam dug in his heels, sensing the prospect of total victory, and refused to let U.N. inspectors continue to roam Iraq. The inspectors withdrew, and the world waited to see what countermeasures Clinton would order. Would he attack Iraq and demand that inspections resume?

No way. Instead President Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair tacitly conceded Saddam's ability to oust the inspectors by responding with only four days of intense bombing to protest against his action. American and British troops fired four hundred cruise missiles and two hundred aircraft strikes against Iraq, claiming that it had severely damaged Iraq's ability to produce and repair ballistic missiles, and set back its chemical and biological weapons capabilities.

Cloaking allied impotence in high-flown rhetoric, Blair labeled the new Iraq policy as "containment," stressing that he and the United States were "ready to strike again if Hussein again poses a threat to his neighbors or develops weapons of mass destruction." Blair said that ongoing allied vigilance would keep Hussein "in his cage."

Some cage! Free now to use his oil money to build whatever arms he wanted, Saddam Hussein declared victory. Crowing in a speech to his nation, he said: "You were up to the level that your leadership and brother and comrade Saddam Hussein had hoped you would be at . . .so God rewarded you and delighted your hearts with the crown of victory."

With press and media reports focusing on the intensity of the U.S. and British military strike, Saddam again let Clinton posture while he pocketed his ultimate triumph-the inspectors were gone.

The final nail in the coffin of restrictions on Iraq's oil revenues came in January 1999, when the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Peter Burleigh, agreed to eliminate any limitation on Iraqi oil sales.

Nominally, this U.S. concession came to avert a proposal by France, Russia, and China to end the oil embargo altogether. But, as Murkowski put it, "The distinctions between the U.S. plan and the French plan are meaningless. This is the end of the U.N. sanctions regime."

Why Clinton Slept

What accounts for President Clinton's sorry record of weakness in the face of the three-part terrorist threat of al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea? Why was Clinton, so aggressive in domestic policy, so reluctant to move to stop terrorism?

At his core, Bill Clinton is a moral relativist. Things are not black and white to the former president; nor do they easily divide into good and evil. Whether facing partisan adversaries or foreign opponents, Clinton could always see the other side's point of view and make allowances for its conduct. Where George W. Bush sees absolutes, Clinton sees complexity.

Shakespeare's Hamlet summed up Clinton's cluttered mind well:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution,
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, there their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.