President Clinton did give a major speech to the United Nations in September 1998, in which he said that fighting terrorism was "at the top of the U.S. agenda." But as The New York Times noted in its coverage, "if he looked preoccupied, which he did, it was because he was in the awkward position of addressing the United Nations at the same time that a videotape of his testimony to a grand jury investigating the Monica Lewinsky matter was playing on television screens and computer monitors around the world. Some television banks here were playing his speech and the videotape at once." Moreover, noted the Times, "Mr. Clinton did not advance American policy against terrorism in any new direction. ??
Although several terrorist attacks against Americans occurred during Clinton's tenure -- most notably the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa, and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole off the coast of Yemen -- the military response was spotty at best, consisting of a few cruise missiles launched at an abandoned training camp in Afghanistan and a chemical plant in Sudan.
But it isn't just that the Clinton Administration didn't do very much to strike back at terrorists, Clinton?s National Security advisers weren't all that outspoken on the issue either. In 1996, for example, Anthony Lake gave a major speech to the Chicago Foreign Relations Council, entitled "Laying the Foundation for a Post-Cold War World: National Security in the 21st Century." In it, Lake mentions terrorism, almost in passing, as a modern threat, along with drug trafficking and managing environmental disaster. The foreign policy crises he described as "the most urgent" were "repression in Haiti, the war in Bosnia and the containment of Iraq."
The truth is, no one -- not George W. Bush or Condoleezza Rice, and certainly not Bill Clinton or his advisers -- fully understood how grave a threat al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and other Islamist terrorists posed to America until September 11, 2001. We know now, and the true test of leadership is how our leaders responded once the terrorists struck. And here both Bush and Rice look pretty good compared with their predecessors, Richard Clarke's revisionist history notwithstanding.