Over the last few days the media has gone into overdrive pushing the latest Democratic talking points which hold that the Bush Administration is responsible for the September 11th terrorist attacks because they “failed to act” against al-Qaeda in the eight and a half months that elapsed between when they took office and the attacks. Some versions of this story hold that the Bush Administration was “handed a plan” to destroy the terrorists when they took office and failed to act upon it because they were obsessed with Missile Defense and Iraq. To say that, given the sources, they accusations lack credibility is a lot like saying that Britney Spears is just a little slutty.

Richard Clarke’s new book Against All Enemies is soaking up a lot more coverage than it deserves. Clarke, it appears, is a partisan Democrat. Records suggest that he’s made donations to two Democratic Congressional candidates, and his best friend is Rand Beers, who is John Kerry’s leading foreign policy advisor. This is a man who was, within the Bush Administration, denied the high office he thought he deserved (presumably that of Secretary of Homeland Security) so he turned hostile.

There’s a common myth these days (typically repeated by Iraq War opponents) that “everyone” supported the post 9-11 invasion of Afghanistan. This is simply untrue. A poll taken in November of 2001 showed that 26% of respondents opposed sending American troops to Afghanistan and other polls showed broadly similar numbers. And, in any case, a fair number of the supporters of the invasion played the whole thing passive-aggressively. If you were paying attention, you’ll remember the type. Mostly liberals (and people who would go on to oppose the invasion of Iraq), these people would affirm their support of action in Afghanistan, and then would state all sorts of reasons why it was a bad idea, likely to fail, etc. “We must respond to terror, but the Administration is failing to consider (the Arab Street/the Fierce Afghan Winter/the armies swallowed up by Afghanistan’s harsh terrain/whatever),” they would say.

Now, by many accounts, the Bush Administration was already making plans for military action in Afghanistan before September 11th. This fact has, indeed, been citied by the conspiratorially-minded opponents of the President as “proof” that the 9-11 was launched to provide an excuse for the seizure of Central Asian oil (it’s always the oil with those people). However, it is absurd for the critics of the President to pretend that they’d have been all for a preemptive war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

I can hear their complaints now. They’d have been the same as those used before the Iraq War, but multiplied because the advocates would not have had September 11th to help them make their point. We’d have been treated to lengthy discussions of all the difficulty of the task, how it would provoke terrorism, how it would cause the collapse of “moderate” Moslem governments, how it would result in a humanitarian disaster, and how the Europeans opposed it.

When was this invasion going to be launched, anyways? It took a few months for the Administration to simply take charge and it would have taken another several months (more even, given that this was pre 9-11) to secure the necessary backing in the region. Recall, the invasion of Afghanistan managed to come off so quickly because of the impetus provided by the attacks. Looking at the length of the Gulf War build-up, and all of the necessary diplomatic wrangling, six months of planning, deployment, and diplomacy does not seem to be an unrealistic figure. Add two months to that for the Administration merely to take charge and get its bearings and that makes the projected D-Day September 20th, 2001.

In any case, I have a hard time believing that the Clinton Administration proposed anything that would have really helped to stop the terrorists. After all, just a few months before Bush took office, Clinton’s national security team declined to retaliate for the attack on the USS Cole because they did not, in the words of Defense Secretary William Cohen, consider it to be a “sufficient provocation.” Yeah, those were the sort of people busy planning a preemptive war.

Oh, and does anyone think for a second that the Europeans would have been for this war? If so, what gives you that idea? After all, a lot of people in Europe opposed the invasion of Afghanistan after 9-11. Is it not the case that keeping our European “friends” happy ought to be the core goal of American foreign policy?

Clinton was in office for eight years. He did nothing to stop the terrorists. In fact, by retreating under fire from Somalia he emboldened them. Osama Bin Laden himself has explained this fact (which ought to have been self-evident in any case). Clinton’s weakness led directly to September 11th, this should be obvious to any fair observer.

When Clinton ordered the withdrawal from Somalia after the “Blackhawk Down” incident (which could have been prevented if his Defense Secretary had allowed the commander on the ground there to have the equipment he asked for) it convinced Bin Laden and his comrades that the United States was weak and cowardly: that it would run from a real fight.

So Bin Laden set out to drive Americans from the Islamic world by killing enough to them to scare them away. Murder enough Americans, he calculated, and they will decided to wash their hands of the Middle East (and Israel as well), opting for dishonor rather than death. When his initial attacks failed to cause a withdrawal (but also failed to bring a serious response) he concluded that the problem was that the attacks had been too small to be seriously felt by the American people. So he launched a bigger attack. And here we are.

All these attacks on the Administration are little more than an effort to deflect attention from this fact and the additional salient fact that Democrats have no real plan for fighting terrorism beyond sarcasm. Not to say that they don’t have a plan for dealing with terrorism in terms of politics: that they do have.

The obvious thing to me is that, especially from a the perspective of a Democratic President, the best way to respond to terrorism politically is to talk tough, launch some strikes that look good on TV, and then to use the attacks to bolster partisan political projects.

When I think upon it, the response of a Gore Administration to September 11th would have gone something like this. There would have been a military response, probably a combination of air strikes on al-Qaeda targets and perhaps a few Special Forces strikes. I doubt if there would have been any serious effort to overthrow the Taliban. Certainly there would have been no invasion of Iraq. No intense effort like those seen in the last two and a half years. They probably would have pushed for the ratification of the Kyoto Treaty (as a way of winning international support). Oh, and they would have pushed Israel to do a deal with the killer Yassir Arafat. They’d have also pushed for the International Criminal Court: the better to help cooperation against terror, don’t you know. No one can imagine a President Al Gore waging a war like President Bush has, can they? Can you imagine a President John Kerry doing so?

This whole dispute smacks of Democratic desperation. They understand that, John Kerry’s immature taunts aside, if this election is fought on issues of terrorism and national security they will lose. So they’re trying to play their trump card: to blame Bush for 9-11. That they’re doing this so early seemingly suggests to me that they’ve determined that they must do something to arrest Kerry’s sudden loss of momentum. It is especially notable that the release of Clarke’s book was suddenly brought up a full month: don’t think that to be simply a coincidence.

The real question here is this: which Presidential candidate will best be able to kill the terrorists? I don’t think that any sane person questions that the answer to that is simple: George Walker Bush. There’s no “nuance” to be had here. We are in a fight against a monstrous foe, one which means to destroy our civilization. This is a fight that we must win. It is the battle of all decent and moral humans.