Back to the 90s--But not the 80s
It should probably be stressed again that the U.S. did a great job of going after Al Qaeda for the first few months after 9/11--and there is still a lot of intelligent work going on in several different countries. (Link from Instapundit). (Here are some interesting articles (here and here) stressing the importance of Indonesia and the Phillipines in 2002--and indicating that any attack on Iraq may go on the back burner). (There are striking similarities to the Cold War here, including the fact that the U.S. might work closely with some nasty regimes; they may be SOBs, in what I'm pretty sure are LBJ's words, but they will be "our" SOBs.)
The invasion of Iraq remains a great diversion or question mark: will it somehow weaken "international terrorism" by taking away some of its hope of easy victories, or strengthen it by exposing a huge U.S. occupying force to hatred and guerilla attacks?
Insofar as the Adminisration's defenders are willing to admit a certain uncertainty as to what to do next, they are tempted to go back to the past. Couldn't somebody else have taken care of this problem, so that W. wouldn't have had to?
So Republicans find a new reason to attack Clinton. He knew about Al Qaeda, but did virtually nothing. He insisted on the "isolated cells" model of terrorism, and then argued that it was old-fashioned police work that was appropriate, not a massive reaction by the U.S. against "host" countries.
Now, lo and behold: those people we were helping in Bosnia (a mission many Bush defenders have always criticized) included: some of the same terrorists we are fighting now! (Link from the Corner).
I guess this might at least counter-balance the repeated suggestions that Al Qaeda was created practically from nothing, with considerable help from the U.S., during the mujahadeen war in Afghanistan, when...er...Reagan was President.
Somewhere just over the horizon, a strange possibility is starting to appear: a U.S. president springs Milosevic from prison, dusts off his lapels, and says "I hope I wasn't out of line with those 'war criminal' remarks. We're all fighting Islamic terrorists now."
For those who don't know, I'm paraphrasing the classic sitcom, Get Smart.
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