But in July 2000, Clinton's famous luck helped him again. A major donor to his campaign, Mansoor Ijaz, approached the administration with an offer from a Gulf state to help apprehend bin Laden. The deal was designed to be unofficial, according to the Sunday Times of London, which retrieved e-mail copies of some of the negotiations. The Clinton administration went directly to the United Arab Emirates to confirm the offer. The UAE, upset that the secrecy of the operation had been violated, denied that there was an offer. Subsequently, according to the Sunday Times, "a third more mysterious offer to help came from the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, then led by Prince Turki al-Faisal, according to Washington sources. Details of the offer are still unclear although, by one account, Turki offered to help to place a tracking device in the luggage of bin Laden's mother, who was seeking to make a trip to Afghanistan to see her son. The CIA did not take up the offer." This final inconclusive offer represented the third chance that the Clinton administration had to apprehend bin Laden. The final two offers were certainly less promising than the 1996 Sudan opportunity. But given how dangerous bin Laden had become, it is astonishing that more effort wasn't made to clinch the deals.

There have been, of course, several spirited attempts to exonerate the record of Bill Clinton. The record of the new Bush administration surely wasn't much better. But at least by the summer, the new president had ordered up a new strategy for dealing with al-Qaida that was more ambitious than "swatting at flies," as Bush described the previous strategy. The proposal for a real campaign was to reach the new president's desk Sept. 10. It was too late. But it remains a fact that the new administration had devised in eight months a strategy that Bill Clinton had delayed for eight years.

There are other mitigating arguments made in Clinton's defense. The first is that hindsight is easy and that no one realized the extent of the threat until Sept. 11. This is simply untrue. Government report after report warned of serious vulnerabilities. Bombing after bombing by bin Laden showed his capabilities. As early as 1993, the press was full of warning signs. Here's one: "The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these Islamic extremists can be," wrote Salman Rushdie in the New York Times after the first WTC bombing. By 1998, the punditocracy was full of prescience. Here's Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post after the cruise missile attacks in response to the embassy bombings: "There are troubling signs that this president could once again stage a pinprick raid, announce the problem solved and turn back to his own domestic and personal preoccupations. A single night of missile strikes against remote desert sites will not leave America's self-declared enemies off balance for long." That, of course, is exactly what Bill Clinton did.

Here's Paul Bremer in the Post in August 1998: "The ideology of such groups makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures ... We cannot seek a political solution with them." He then proposed the following: "Defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad ... Attack the enemy. Keep up the pressure on terrorist groups. Show that we can be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush bin Laden's operations by pressure and disruption. The U.S. government further should announce a large reward for bin Laden's capture -- dead or alive." Whatever excuses the Clintonites can make, they cannot argue that the threat wasn't clear, that the solution wasn't proposed, that a strategy for success hadn't been outlined. Everything necessary to prevent Sept. 11 had been proposed in private and in public, in government reports and on op-ed pages, for eight long years. The Clinton administration simply refused to do anything serious about the threat.

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